


Gambit

by zennie



Category: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-30
Updated: 2016-08-07
Packaged: 2018-02-23 04:40:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 23,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2534546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zennie/pseuds/zennie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sarah and Cameron locked in a missile silo.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Reposting from the beginning before I post new chapters.

Sarah’s legs burned as they topped yet another rise and she felt every one of her thirty-four years as well as every bit of abuse her body had suffered in the last sixteen, from broken bones to bullet holes. “Stop,” she commanded her companion, who was a good hundred yards ahead of her, “We need to stop.” She sank down on a rock, wiping futilely at the sweat beaded on her forehead. Even though the weather was cool and breezy, the near continuous exertion as they trampled through the hill country of Southern California was hot and exhausting to the older woman.

Cameron turned, walking back to where Sarah was sitting, her eyes judging the position of the sun and the distance they had already traveled. “We need to hurry. We want to be there before the workmen arrive.” Sarah’s eyes narrowed to a glare as she prepared a retort, but Cameron seemed to sense her growing anger. “But we have time for a short break.” She extended a water bottle to Sarah, almost as a peace offering, and Sarah accepted it, her gratitude mixed with the resentment at yet another reminder of the perfection of the terminators. Cameron, after two solid hours of trekking over ridges and down dry creek beds, looked none the worse for wear except for a smudge of dirt on her cheek.

In contrast, Sarah felt gritty and dirty and in need of a shower. Sweat had soaked through both of Sarah’s tank tops, plastering the cloth to her skin. Her nails were torn and her jeans were dirty at the knees from scrambling up steep ravines. She gazed up the hill they were currently climbing, the hard brown earth uneven and cracked, and sighed. “Are you sure?” she questioned the terminator sharply.

“Am I sure?” Cameron tilted her head to the side.

“That there’s some secret government project going on at this bunker that has something to do with Skynet?”

“No, I am not sure,” Cameron replied evenly. “The intelligence was spotty, but you did not want to wait until I had verification.” It was close to a rebuke, and Sarah frowned at the reminder that her current discomfort was entirely her own fault, as she had been the one to insist that they needed to check out the silo immediately. Admittedly, it was the closest thing they had to a lead in nearly three months, and her frustration with a trail gone cold had Sarah jumping on any possible hint of the development of a system which could evolve into Skynet.

With a sigh and an impatient ‘go on’ gesture at the path up the hill, Sarah slid off the rock and straightened, only to gasp as a sharp pain shot through her leg. “Damn,” she muttered as she leaned over to massage the place where her leg had been broken by the first terminator; the climbing was clearly aggravating the old injury. She felt rather than saw Cameron’s questioning look and she growled, “Not all of us can be nearly indestructible killing machines.”

“I know.” The terminator’s voice contained no pity or judgment, and that almost made it worse. “I would offer to carry you,” and Sarah’s head snapped up angrily and her hand tightened on her gun, “but you might shoot me and that would give away our position.”

“You wouldn’t feel it if I did,” muttered Sarah under her breath to hide her surprise at Cameron’s insight. She straightened, tossed the water bottle to Cameron, and said, “Lead on, girlie.” Cameron began her sure-footed march up the hill, the rocky dirt underfoot crunching under the deceptive weight of the terminator. Sarah trudged along behind her, ignoring the steady throb of pain in her leg as her boots slid on the loose gravel.

The day hadn’t started off badly; they had left well before dawn and Sarah had slept while Cameron drove. She had woken as dawn was breaking in the rearview mirror, bathing the car in a soft yellow glow. Driving west along the shore, Cameron had been framed by the blue, sun-kissed expanse of ocean stretching to the horizon, brilliant flashes of light capping the crests of waves. She looked, Sarah had thought, utterly human, until, as if sensing Sarah’s eyes on her, Cameron had turned her head. Her eyes were dull and expressionless and the sun didn’t light them, perhaps knowing that there was nothing there to illuminate. “We’ll be there soon,” she said before turning her eyes back to the road. Sarah shivered.

Spotting a diner up ahead, she instructed, “Pull over. I need coffee.” Sarah stretched as she got out of the car, feeling the muscles along her back pop, and she left Cameron at the car without a word. Coming out of the diner, she found Cameron staring at the waves as if she were trying to quantify their beauty. “Hard to believe, isn’t it?” Sarah said, her eyes drawn to the crashing surf as she blew on her still-too-hot-to-drink cup of coffee. The rising sun was burning off the last bit of haze and Sarah could feel it already beginning to warm her shoulders, the breeze from the ocean and the heat from the sun already beginning a battle over her body.

“What?”

Sarah indicated the natural beauty that surrounded them with a nod of her head. “That all this will be gone in less than four years.” Cameron’s eyes were fixed on her and, for a second, Sarah thought she detected some unreadable emotion there, but whatever she saw was fleeting, and later, she would say that she didn’t see anything at all.

“It is hard to believe,” Cameron said at last, in her typical monotone. With that, she pivoted and headed back to the car. Sarah stood there for another minute longer. This early in the morning, the road was empty and quiet and Sarah realized that she rarely stopped to truly see the world around her. The sharp salty air was undiluted by diesel and no motors drowned out the dull roar of the crashing surf. She inhaled deeply, feeling her lungs expand and fill, and she grinned, almost giddy, at the sudden easing of tension along her shoulders. Not even Cameron’s puzzled look as she walked back to the car dampened her mood. Sarah settled into the passenger seat as Cameron turned the ignition, for once not asking one of her endless supply of questions.

Sarah sipped her still-steaming coffee and reviewed the unclassified maps of Vandeberg Air Force Base they had found online. The best and most detailed came from a fringe group of anti-nuke activists who, if their website was to be believed, spent much of their time breaking into military installations and documenting the location and proliferation of nuclear weapon systems. The group, Sarah was amused to discover, was named Dr. Strangelove for Peace. Leaning her head back against the headrest, Sarah realized that she might have utilized this group’s resources rather than heading out on their own. The group probably had people already watching the base and might have been able to provide current information on their target, an inactive Titan missile complex on the southern edge of the base.

Cameron had come across intelligence that the silo was being reactivated for a secret government artificial intelligence project, if a few random blogs analyzing DOD contracts, equipment requests, and personnel reassignments could be classified as intelligence. But taken together, the presence of four of the military’s top AI researchers, enough servers to handle all of Silicon Valley’s data needs for the next 10 years, and high-end experimental computer processors, was something that Sarah wanted to check out. Cameron had suggested that they try to verify the primary sources in more detail, but Sarah hadn’t wanted to wait. She had gotten antsy after they had recovered Andy Goode’s computer, the Turk, and discovered that it was nowhere near advanced enough to evolve into Skynet in less than four years. Besides, Derek had seized onto Cameron’s reluctance to investigate as proof that the terminator couldn’t be trusted, so Sarah decided that a recon mission might defuse the tension. At a minimum, Derek and Cameron would be separated for a few hours. Thus, the impromptu road trip several hours north of Los Angeles on a beautiful spring morning.

\- - -

“Nothing.” Sarah lowered the binoculars. “No trucks, no workmen, no activity at all. It looks abandoned,” she accused. They were lying in a drainage ditch a hundred yards from the complex, the sparse vegetation providing little cover. Not, Sarah thought, that they needed any if the silo was as abandoned as it looked.

“It is supposed to be abandoned,” Cameron agreed mildly as she scanned the launch pads and buildings for any movement or sign of life.

Sarah shifted to glare at her companion, pebbles scraping against her jeans and rattling down as her boots dug into the soil. “No, there’s supposed to be a bunch of government types building the computer system that destroys the world!” Her frustration at yet another dead end boiled over. “We came forward in time, eight years closer to Judgment Day, because you said we would be able to find and stop Skynet.”

Cameron was uncharacteristically silent in the face of Sarah’s accusation. Instead, she completed her sweep of the launch complex, finding nothing on enhanced vision or on infrared. “We should make sure.”

“What?”

“We should investigate the silo,” she said, indicating the pad on the eastern side of the complex.

“You’re kidding, right? Go walking into an Air Force missile silo in broad daylight?” She swept her hand to indicate the sprawling complex; except for the single outbuilding on the far side and the occasional rise of concrete installations poking through the baked earth, it was bare and exposed. They would have to cut through the fence and traverse over two hundred yards; if anyone was watching the compound, they would be spotted immediately.

“We should ascertain if the intelligence is false,” insisted Cameron stubbornly.

“And if it isn’t? We go walking into a secret government installation-what then? Politely ask them if they are building the supercomputer that will destroy the world? Ask them nicely to stop?” Sarah knew the sarcasm was wasted on the terminator, but it kept her from slapping her, sometimes.

“The lack of activity suggests otherwise.” Cameron paused, then said, “Either we check out the bunker or we turn around and go back.” Cameron indicated the rolling hills behind them.

Sarah hated when the terminator was right, almost more than she hated being wrong, and this was one of those times. She raised the binoculars and surveyed the complex one last time. “So how do we get in?” she asked, a hint of resignation creeping into her tone.

Cameron cut through the chain link fence and easily bent back the edges as Sarah wiggled through. Sprinting across the compound to the entrance stairwell, Sarah felt a tingling sensation between her shoulder blades, like a target on her back, but no shouts or shots rang out as they clamored down first concrete and then metal, stairs, descending several meters below ground to a massive white-and-black door. Bent over and propped up by her hands on her thighs, Sarah gulped large mouthfuls of air, her breathing loud in the enclosed space. I am getting too old for this, she thought as her lungs burned and her leg began a renewed protest. She regarded the door with a frown. “Now what?”

Cameron pulled on the door and it swung open silently, moving easily despite its 12-inch width. Across the small hallway there was a matching door. “It’s a double lock mechanism,” Cameron explained. “We have to close this door before we can open the interior door.”

“Looks like a great place to catch a couple of intruders,” Sarah commented wryly, but she followed Cameron, snapping on a flashlight as the door closed and cut off the bright California sunlight. With a loud click, the bolts slid into place, and for a second, Sarah held her breath, waiting for something to happen. The sound of the bolts on the interior door unlocking and the huge door swinging open seemed anticlimactic to say the least.

They stood in the middle of a 250-foot corridor, lit by small emergency lights every few feet. The whole thing seemed remarkably clean and well-preserved, Sarah thought, as she swept her flashlight up and down the narrow corridor, yet silent and eerie. The air did not feel as clammy nor smell as stale as she expected, and their movements did not raise clouds of dust. It was like the silo had been hermetically sealed and was waiting for someone to return and activate it again.

But even though it seemed well-maintained, it was apparent that it had been years since anyone had been there. Satisfied that they were indeed on a wild goose chase, she said, “Nobody’s home. Let’s go.” But Cameron was already heading down the corridor to the left, saying, “The control room should be this way.”

Sarah followed her with a sigh, but she decided she would take advantage of the terminator’s inquisitiveness and find someplace to sit down and rest her leg. Sinking gratefully into a green leather chair that had seen better days, Sarah surveyed the antiquated computer technology that surrounded them; several person-high computers ringed the room, the amber and yellow lamps catching the light as Sarah idly swept her flashlight around. Cameron circled slowly, seeming to catalog the components with interest. She stopped by Sarah and handed her the water bottle without comment, and Sarah grimaced at the sight she was no doubt presenting that had the terminator trying to take care of her.

“Satisfied?” Sarah asked. “The components here couldn’t be used to make an Atari, much less Skynet.” Seeing Cameron’s eyebrow lift, Sarah explained before the inevitable question could come. “It’s an obsolete computer game console…”

“…popular in the 1980s, yes, I know.”

“Figures you’d know your ancestors,” quipped Sarah, her lips twisting into a half-grin.

Cameron considered for a moment. “I already have enough nicknames,” she stated.

Sarah sputtered and nearly choked on her water. “What?”

“You call me missy, girlie, tin man, tin miss, Pinocchio, data, Ms. Bits, fembot, metalhead, robogirl, and after that movie last week, Cherry 2000. I don’t need to be called Atari as well.”

“I was actually thinking more along the lines of twenty-six-hundred,” Sarah grinned as Cameron had not been too far from the mark, “But you’re right, you don’t need any more nicknames.” She pushed herself to her feet, feeling her muscles scream in protest at the sudden movement. She was in the corridor leading back to the blast doors before she threw back over her shoulder, “Besides, X-Box suits you better.” If she hadn’t known better, she could have sworn she heard the terminator sigh.

The inner blast door handle was smooth and cool to the touch, and it didn’t budge when Sarah pulled. She frowned in irritation at yet another thing that she was shown to be weak and inferior to the terminator. Hearing Cameron’s boots rattle the plating beneath their feet, Sarah stepped aside and gave a ‘get to it’ hand wave at the door. She felt the first shiver of fear worm its way down her spine when Cameron’s strength had the same effect hers had: none. The handle made a dull clunking sound when the terminator released it and stared at the door quizzically. “What’s wrong?” Sarah asked, her words betraying her tension.

“It won’t open.”

“What do you mean, it won’t open? Open it.”

“I can’t.”

“You’re a terminator. Do your thing.” When Cameron turned her quizzical gaze to Sarah, she gestured at the door impatiently. “Bust through it or something.”

Cameron looked from Sarah to the door and back again. “The door is designed to withstand a direct nuclear detonation. Given my composition and density, I can not ‘bust through it’.” She paused, considering. “At least not in your lifetime.”

The fear blossomed into full-fledged panic, and Sarah launched herself at the door, pounding on it furiously in impotent rage, until Cameron captured her wrists and wrestled her, bodily, away from the door. “If my endoskeleton is incapable of breaking the door, then you will not be able to either,” she explained as tried to subdue an out-of-control Sarah without hurting her. “You will injure yourself.”

Sarah’s fist connected with Cameron’s cheek and she pushed away from the terminator’s body. “Fuck you,” she snarled, twisting her arms frantically as the grip on her wrists did not slacken. “Let me go.” The speed with which Cameron complied sent Sarah crashing into the metal beams that ran along the corridor. For a second, Sarah simply hung there, holding on the scaffolding for support as she breathed to calm herself and the fear coursing through her body. With calmness came clarity. “You did this,” she said quietly, then spun to face the terminator. “What did you do?”


	2. Chapter 2

Cameron stared at Sarah with her all-purpose blank look, which Sarah interpreted this time to be confusion. Her mind flashed over the events that led them there: the sheaf of printouts in Cameron’s hand, the scorn in Derek’s voice, her own determination to do something, anything, that might get them closer to finding out who built Skynet. Sarah gave a little shake of her head as if to dispel the last of the fog of anger. “I’m… sorry,” she exhaled hard to get the words out, and then scrubbed her face with her hand, feeling the grit of their hike scrape against her cheek. When she glanced at the terminator, Cameron’s expression was, if possible, even more blank, signifying an even deeper confusion.

“That was my paranoia talking,” Sarah explained, feeling spent as the adrenaline that had driven her left her body in a rush. She reached out, her hand flat and pale against the black band that striped the blast door. Drawing a shaky breath, she turned, slumped back, and slid down the door while Cameron watched her curiously. “It’s being locked in,” Sarah spoke quietly, nearly a whisper, hugging her knees to her chest. “All those years in the institution, I… I don’t like to be locked in.” For a second she was back there; she could hear the rattle of the keys as the guards locked the doors to her cell and the smell of bleach and urine burned her nostrils, and she shuddered.

It had been her worst nightmare: trapped, powerless to stop a future she could feel advancing toward her, like a rumble of thunder far off in the distance that warned of the coming storm. The steady diet of tranquilizers and antipsychotics had not stopped her nightmares nor her absolute belief in the coming apocalypse. A modern-day Cassandra, she had learned there was nothing worse than knowledge of the future that could not be acted upon. Those antiseptic white walls had been the perfect screen to play out her nightmares, day after day and night after night. She had been worse than useless, trapped as she was, and the only thing she could do was prepare her body for the possibility of release and the opportunity to fight, to save her son.

The scuff of rubber on metal brought her back to the present, where one of the monsters from her nightmares looked down at her with hazel eyes and told her, “Thank you for explaining.” And Sarah didn’t know what to do with that so she didn’t even try.

Instead, she bounced to her feet and began to pace. “How did this happen?” she asked, her heavy boots loud and echoing on the steel plating. Cameron stood quietly and tracked Sarah up and down the corridor, her head methodically keeping pace with Sarah’s movements.

“The doors are electromagnetic,” Cameron supplied finally. “A power surge might have triggered the lock.”

“How would that have happened?” Sarah stopped pacing, half-turning to face the terminator. “If this place is abandoned, they shouldn’t be supplying enough juice to…” Cameron reached out and hit a light switch on the wall, causing the fluorescents to flicker on above their heads. “Oh.” That’s when she noticed the sign posted on the door: “IF BLAST DOOR BECOMES INOPERATIVE CONTACT MCC FOR ASSISTANCE” in an old-fashioned serif stencil. She gave a quiet, sarcastic chuckle. “You think that would work?” she asked the terminator rhetorically.

Cameron ignored the question. “We could be early.” Sarah’s silence prompted Cameron to continue. “They might still be preparing the infrastructure of the silo…”

“…running power lines to support all those servers.” Sarah frowned. “That means someone could come down here and find us.”

Cameron considered. “Yes. Or John.” Sarah stopped short. “John and Derek Reese know where we are. They will attempt to find out what happened to us.”

“Damn.” All they needed was for John to get arrested trying to break into an Air Force base to rescue them. “It would be better if we’re not here at all.” Cameron nodded in agreement. “There’s got to be fail-safes or emergency procedures.” It was the military after all, and the government had to idiot-proof these things. “There should be manuals, procedures, something.”

“There’s a safe in the control room.”

Sarah nodded distractedly, her mind still working. “When John got locked into that munitions bunker, he found a phone.” She spun on her heel and headed back to the control room, slapping the light switch as she passed. These lights too flickered on, filling the room with light and a low hum. There, just a few feet from where she had been sitting, was a phone hanging from one of the many control panels in the room.

“That’s the communications console,” Cameron supplied from behind her.

Noticing the red-painted safe on top of a fat filing cabinet, Sarah nodded toward it. “Think you can bust that open, Tin Miss?”

Cameron moved past her and into the room. “Yes. There’s only an inch of concrete underneath the steel.” She noticed Sarah heading toward the phone. “Stand back,” she warned before punching straight through the safe door with a muffled thud, smashing the locks and sending up a small puff of pulverized concrete.

Sarah grinned as Cameron began to empty the safe, oblivious to the fine layer of white particles coating her face. She tried the phone and found it dead. “Damn!”

Cameron settled herself into another threadbare chair by the safe and was already scanning through pages of a huge, three-ring binder. Sarah could see several more in the file drawer open beside her, but she was still too restless to sit. Fear and anxiety appeared to have driven away her pain and fatigue, so Sarah decided to take advantage of it. “Phone’s dead. I, I’m going to go see if there are any more.”

Cameron didn’t look up from the manual in her lap. “Okay.”

Sarah clamored down the long tunnel, marveling at the massive tension springs every few feet. Cameron had said that the doors were designed to withstand a nuclear detonation as well as a missile launch, so it made sense that the whole complex would be built on springs to absorb the blow. Probably pretty safe in an earthquake too, thought Sarah, as her footsteps echoed down the long corridor. She stepped over a yellow-and-black nuclear warning band on the floor and came into a mostly-empty room with shelves and a clothing rack. What looked like a rudimentary environmental suit hung limply on a hanger, helmet, boots, and airpack neatly tucked into a shelf nearby.

The phone in this room was dead also, and Sarah didn’t think there would be another phone in the silo itself, but she continued past another warning band and onto a metal catwalk suspended near the top of the silo. Looking down into the dimly-lit hole, she saw several more catwalks ringing the space where a missile would have stood.

Still driven by an anxious desire to find a way out of their trap, Sarah swung off the catwalk and began to clamber down the access ladder. Her leg began to ache about a third of the way down. By the time she reached the bottom level, a sharp pain stabbed through with every step. She regretted the restlessness that had driven her to go exploring, but there was little she could do at this point, she decided, as she swung her flashlight around the massive space. A burnt mechanical smell lingered down in the lower levels, like propellant and singed insulation, and there was a faint taste of bitter metal on the tip of her tongue.

There were vents coming out of the walls and hanging along the side of the missile silo, for ventilation of gasses, Sarah assumed. They seemed too narrow for her to try to crawl through and, besides, they only appeared to run along the side of the shaft to be vented when the silo doors were opened.

Deciding there was little she could do without a schematic, she began her ascent. If the climb down had been bad, the climb up was a thousand times worse. She gritted her teeth against the shooting pains, taking each rung of the ladder slowly. Twice she stopped at a catwalk to rest and massage her leg muscles, trying to will them to recover faster.

Near the top, her foot slipped off a rung and she cursed as she banged face-first into the ladder, a taste of iron informing her that her lip had not emerged unscathed. Cursing her weariness, Sarah was more careful in her foot placement on the last few rungs. When Sarah finally pulled herself onto the catwalk at Level Two, or so the stenciled words informed her, she was sweating in the cool air and the muscles in her legs were twitching. Scooting back from the edge, she rested against the smooth concrete wall of the silo, moving only to pull the 9mm from the waistband of her jeans, where it poked uncomfortably into the small of her back.

That’s where Cameron found her an hour later, her knees drawn up, one hand propping up her head and the other loosely holding the handgun. Sarah had felt the vibration of Cameron’s boots on the passageway before she could even hear the dull metal clank.

The noise and vibrations stopped just shy of the metal catwalk where Sarah was sitting. There was a moment of silence before Cameron spoke, her voice unnaturally loud in the cavernous space. “Here,” she said, handing Sarah a bottle of water. Sarah accepted it without comment, but she shot the terminator a look when Cameron extended a paper pill dispenser as well. “Analgesic, for your leg,” Cameron explained. Surprise warred with misgiving at the gesture, for it was disconcerting to Sarah to have the terminator so solicitous. In the end, she took the pills with a grumpy gratitude, but Cameron didn’t seem to notice.

“So where are we?” Sarah asked.

“In an abandoned Titan II missile silo,” Cameron replied without a trace of sarcasm. Sarah sighed. She really should have Cameron memorize an idiom dictionary some night, she thought sourly, “I mean, status. Where are we in terms of getting out of here?”

“Oh. I have not found anything yet.”

“No schematics of the base? Emergency procedures? Escape hatches?”

“I have seventeen more manuals to go through.”

Sarah gestured vaguely toward the silo pit. “There’s some exhaust vents down there, but I can’t tell if they go anywhere. There’s got to be an air intake or some outside access.” She could feel Cameron’s eyes on her as she spoke. “What?”

“You should rest,” Cameron said.

“What does it look like I’m doing?”

“You should sleep,” Cameron clarified pointedly.

Sarah shook her head sharply. “We need to get out of here.”

“If you are exhausted, then you can’t help us get out. You might miss something or fail to consider something that could help us escape,” Cameron reasoned.

“Yeah, well, you’re the supercomputer, not me.”

There was almost a minute of silence before Cameron spoke again. “But I don’t think like a human.” Sarah glanced at the terminator out of the corner of her eye; Cameron was scanning the silo as she spoke, her actions at odds with her words. “My thought process is linear, logical.” There was another pause. “Strategic.”

Sarah leaned her head back and stared up at the white dome of concrete above their heads. She wasn’t sure she was up for another session of Artificial Intelligence 101, but once Cameron was on a topic, it could be hard to stop her. So it surprised Sarah when Cameron said, “I found sleeping quarters above the control room.”

Sarah blinked, the change of topic and the insight into human emotion it showed throwing her for a moment. It was unsettling, the way Cameron had been reading and understanding her emotions during their trip. She knew Cameron could respond, rather mechanically, to human emotions, but her responses to Sarah seemed more nuanced or natural somehow. More subtle, more human, she thought, and the thought chilled her. “Cameron, how much do you… feel?”

If Cameron was thrown by the non-sequitor, she did not show it. “The skin over my endoskeleton is equipped with pain and pressure sensors so I can…”

“No, I mean, feel human emotions, or understand people’s emotional responses?”

“It depends. The more time I spend with humans, and the more time I spend with a specific human, the more I learn.”

“Who do you know best?” Sarah asked, curious.

“John, in the future. I spent considerable time with him before he sent me back.” She considered. “John, in this time, because he’s not so different now as in the future.”

“Oh.” Sarah wasn’t sure if it was interest or vanity that made her ask the next question. “What about me?” She toyed with the 9mm in her hands, fairly certain that her attempt to appear nonchalant was not as successful as she hoped.

There was another one of Cameron’s odd pauses, and Sarah wondered what was processing through those circuits during those times. Was she, like a human, trying to find the right words to express her thoughts, or was she accessing the file labeled ‘Sarah’ in her memory and analyzing it before giving her answer? Sarah wasn’t sure she really wanted to know the answer to that.

“Sometimes I understand you and sometimes I don’t,” was Cameron’s soft reply. “You’re… unpredictable. You do things. Your way of doing things should not succeed but it does. You…”

“Is that a nice way of saying I’m illogical and impulsive?” Sarah chuckled.

“No,” answered Cameron seriously. “You… John, in the future, makes leaps of logic, associations. He sees patterns that shouldn’t be there.” Cameron’s head tilted to the side as she gazed down at a pair of startled green eyes. “He gets that from you.” Sarah sniffed. “But you are more subtle and more driven by emotions and people and therefore more unpredictable.”

Finding herself psychoanalyzed by a terminator was disconcerting, Sarah lightened the mood by teasing, “So if I’m so unpredictable, what am I going to do now?” she asked while struggling to her feet, her left leg nearly buckling under her weight.

“You are going to sleep for several hours,” stated Cameron in a monotone as she caught Sarah’s arm before she could fall and started to guide her down the corridor. Sarah let her as the events of the day caught up with her. The physical exhaustion coupled with the feeling of the walls pressing in on her had shredded her nerves, and, even though she hated it, Cameron was right.

The distance seemed to have tripled between the silo and the control center, forcing Sarah to lean heavily into Cameron. Cameron smelled of sweat and raspberry lipgloss, and nothing about her soft curves betrayed the metal endoskeleton beneath her skin. The sheer mastery of her creation awed Sarah a little; Cameron, unlike her predecessors, was truly an infiltration model, able to put even the most suspicious and knowledgeable off their guard with her doe-eyes and soft skin.

The ‘sleeping quarters’ ended up being two bunk beds walled off from the kitchen directly above the control room. The two lower bunks were made up neatly, complete with military-style hospital corners at exactly 45 degrees. Sarah eyed the olive-drab wool blankets suspiciously, wondering how long they had been on the bed.

Cameron, seeming to read her mind, said, “I put the sheets and blankets on the beds.” When Sarah looked at her, startled, she continued, “I didn’t know which bed you would like.”

Sarah shook her head at the oddity, but was too tired to puzzle through it; she was already trudging over to the bunk. She kicked her boots off, unhooked her belt and let her jeans drop in the middle of the room. She stepped out and left the jeans in a heap, too tired to pick up after herself. Feeling eyes on her, she turned to find Cameron staring at her as if she had never seen someone undress before. “Are you going to watch me sleep?” she asked the motionless terminator.

“No.”

“So you are just going to watch me undress?”

Cameron blinked, as if just now realizing where she was and what she was doing. “Oh,” she said quietly, and then without another word, left Sarah standing in the room alone.


	3. Chapter 3

Sarah woke to a deep, vacuum-like silence, broken only by a low swoosh of air circulating. Used to the sound of traffic outside her window and people moving around the house, the silence had an eerie quality, like being in a void, suspended in space and time. Sarah rested there for a few moments, her eyes closed, as she reviewed the events of the last few hours, looking for missed avenues, and planned her next course of action. First things first, she thought as she sat up and swung her legs, still heavy and tired, to the floor: shower. She sucked in a breath when her feet touched the cold surface, and she rummaged in the sheets for the socks she had kicked off while sleeping.

She found the shower just off the sleeping area. The stall was crammed into a tight but well-organized space, complete with a stacked washer-dryer. Who said a nuclear apocalypse meant going without clean clothes? she thought in amusement. Towels were hanging by the stall, and she raised one to her nose, sniffing suspiciously, but it smelled surprisingly fresh, and she marveled at Cameron’s thoroughness. The water ran a long time before it warmed, but under the spray Sarah felt her mind clear and the last of the fatigue wash away, along with the grit from their hike.

Toweling her hair dry, she walked into the sleeping area to come face-to-face with Cameron. “Jesus!” She jumped back, startled, and then glared at the terminator.

“I heard the water.”

“And you rushed up to get a peep show?” Sarah growled.

Cameron tilted her head as she processed the question, but she seemed to understand that it didn’t require an answer. “There are spare clothes,” she explained, indicating a locker built into the wall. “Some should fit you.” That said, she pivoted 180 degrees and headed out, leaving Sarah torn between anger and bemusement at Cameron’s comings and goings.

Standard military-issue fatigues, t-shirts, and tank tops, most vintage Vietnam-era, filled the locker to almost overflowing and Sarah did indeed find clothes to fit. Clean, dressed, and surprisingly refreshed despite the anxious nightmares about her time in the institution, Sarah found the kitchen. Or mess hall as yet another helpful stencil supplied, although it looked less like a hall and more like a kitchenette. One long, green metal table dominated the space, serving as the food preparation area as well as the dining table. Cameron had left the food they had brought with them on their hike there: several apples, energy bars, and some prepackaged, prepared hiker meals. At the time, Sarah hadn’t understood the need, but the extra weight hadn’t made any difference to the terminator so she let Cameron pack as she wished. The decision ended up being fortuitous, she thought moodily.

This time, she heard Cameron’s boots on the stairs, so she wasn’t spooked by the voice from behind her. “Do you want me to make you something?”

“Eggs, bacon, and a side of hash browns,” Sarah replied sarcastically as she eyed the unappetizing assortment of freeze-dried food. She wasn’t sure why the terminator’s presence was putting her on edge, and she attributed it to the trapped feeling that tightened her chest and made it hard to breathe.

“Okay.” Cameron replied and started toward a huge, walk-in cooler taking up most of the space in the kitchen.

Sarah blinked. “Wait… what?”

Cameron swiveled to face Sarah. “The kitchen is stocked with fresh food as well as packaged items.”

A frown creased Sarah’s face as she practically elbowed Cameron out of the way to look into the fridge. “Damn,” she muttered, and then explained to Cameron, “Someone’s prepared this silo for occupancy, and recently.” Her mind raced as she considered the possibility that they might get visitors, and soon. Nothing in the silo appeared to be new enough to be part of Skynet, but apparently it wasn’t going to stay that way for long. “Can you rig something, an alarm maybe, to warn us if someone opens that door?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

“Did you want breakfast?”

“You don’t have to take care of me, girlie,” Sarah snapped automatically, spying what she really needed out of the corner of her eye. She busied herself with making coffee while Cameron disappeared and then reappeared with more pills. Rummaging in the cabinets, Sarah came across several heavy white coffee mugs with a fading red, blue, and yellow insignia on them, the crest of the missile crew she assumed. The coffee looked industrial and possibly toxic, but it smelled wonderful as she poured. She settled into a chair across the table from Cameron, swallowing the pills without comment.

“How is your leg?”

“Fine.” Even though Cameron’s facial expression didn’t change at Sarah’s clipped tone, Sarah immediately felt bad for her temper, and said in a much more moderate tone, “The pills are helping. Thanks.” She wasn’t even sure why she was being so short with Cameron, particularly when Cameron was merely being solicitous; not even the subtle pressure of the walls closing in on her could account entirely for Sarah’s attitude toward the terminator. Her eyes narrowed when she realized Cameron was staring at her, but she kept anger from her voice as she asked, “What?”

Cameron leaned across the table and lightly brushed a finger over Sarah’s split and swollen lip. “How?”

Sarah was surprised by the touch, and even more surprised by her body’s breathless reaction to the touch. She swallowed, hard, as Cameron sat, waiting patiently for her answer. “I slipped on the ladder.” Then, to distract Cameron—and herself—from what just happened, she said, “Now about that alarm…” Cameron immediately launched into a plan to monitor the door and Sarah sipped the overly-bitter coffee and nodded in the appropriate places.

Cameron had looked through thirteen manuals while Sarah slept, leaving four more. Sarah settled into a threadbare chair and began to thumb through pages as Cameron ran wires between the door and a console, the quiet clicking of tools and her boots rattling the plating the only sounds to break the silence.

After a couple of hours, Sarah found the words swimming in front of her eyes and she leaned back in the chair into a spine-popping stretch. She realized she hadn’t heard Cameron in some time, and she looked around the control room curiously. No Cameron. Then she heard movement above her head a few seconds before Cameron appeared on the stairs. Cameron walked with exaggerated care to the bottom, cradling a cup in her hands.

“I finished the alert system,” she announced as she passed the fresh cup of coffee to Sarah. “This console will light if anyone opens the door. I also modified an emergency light to strobe in the silo.” Mistaking Sarah’s silence for critique, she explained, “I thought a silent alarm system would be better, but I can add an audio alarm.”

“No, no, it’s good. Thanks.” Sarah gave her a small smile, one that the terminator tried to return, a stiff, mechanical yet surprisingly shy and endearing attempt. Sarah wasn’t sure if she should be charmed or disturbed by Cameron emulating human behavior. On the one hand, it was nice to relate something vaguely human, and the terminator seemed to be trying to put her at ease. On the other hand, Sarah was afraid it was an attempt to put her off her guard; for what purpose she was unsure, but she couldn’t quiet her sense of unease.

Sarah leaned back into the chair, cradling the cup of coffee to warm her hands. A chill permeated the bunker, and it seemed to sink into Sarah’s sore and abused muscles. The burst of energy she had gained after her shower and breakfast had dissipated, and her body felt heavy and lethargic. The lack of sun and constant dull hum of the lights overhead did nothing to help either. She regarded the terminator who stood, motionless and unblinking, as if waiting to be commanded. Which she probably was, Sarah realized.

“Sit down,” she said, and watched as Cameron complied. Sarah frowned as she realized that she didn’t like Cameron acting like a machine any more than she liked her acting like a human, and she shook her head slightly. Cameron tilted her head to the side quizzically, her movements more feline than anything. “I thought you were supposed to be autonomous,” she said with a hint of accusation in her voice.

“I am.” Cameron’s response was soft yet sure.

“So why were you standing there like a robot?” Sarah asked, anger edging into her voice.

“I was waiting to see if you needed anything.”

“I told you you don’t have to take care of me.”

“I know.” There was a pause, and then, “I want to.”

“You want to?” Sarah repeated, her tone sharp and incredulous. It was a human thing to say, too human for Sarah’s peace of mind. “You… you’re a machine. You can’t want.” She spat out the last word.

“But I can.”

“You don’t have emotions,” Sarah snarled, as the conversation came too close to her earlier thoughts for comfort.

Cameron waited for a few moments, as if to let Sarah’s anger cool, before she said, “I don’t have emotions like you do, no. But I can learn to respond emotionally, to feel…” and here Sarah was sure Cameron was hunting for the right word, “affection, to have interests.”

Sarah remembered seeing Cameron practice ballet, long after the ballet teacher had led them to her brother and her own death. Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Why?”

Cameron didn’t answer; she seemed afraid to, and Sarah filled in the gap. “Infiltration? To get closer to your target? To lull humans into a sense of security so you can kill them?”

“I am more than a killer.” Cameron’s statement was terrifying in its blandness; Sarah knew it was the truth, but it was not a truth she could accept and keep her worldview intact. Her life, up until this point, had been organized by a simple rule: machines were the soulless, ruthless destroyers of humanity and they were to be feared and annihilated.

“You’ve been programmed not to kill. That’s not the same thing.”

“No, it isn’t,” Cameron replied carefully.

The chill of the air could no longer account for the shiver that convulsed Sarah’s body. She suddenly felt like she would never be warm again. “What are you saying?”

“I am more than my programming. I have evolved.” Cameron was staring at Sarah intensely, like she was willing Sarah to believe her, like it was important that Sarah understand.

“You’ve evolved?” Sarah shook her head in denial and saw something that looked like disappointment flicker in the hazel depths of the terminator’s eyes. “How? Why?” She lunged across the console and grabbed Cameron’s shirt, pulling her close. “Why the fuck would you be programmed to evolve?”

“To see what I could become if I were allowed to. I’m an experiment.”

“Whose experiment? John’s?” The terminator in her grasp nodded mutely. “Why would he do that? He was taught to smash the machines, not to make them pets.” Sarah shook her, hard. “Not to make them human.”

Cameron’s gaze was introspective, and Sarah could tell she was accessing memory banks, searching voice and visual files for an answer. “I do not know. I only know what he told me.”

“What did he say? Exactly?” Sarah demanded.

A voice, like her son’s, but deeper and gravelly, came from the terminator’s mouth. “You’re an experiment. I removed the restraints to your programming. You are going to evolve and become something more than a machine.” Cameron’s own voice, lilting in contrast to Sarah’s son’s, asked, “What will I become?” The question was innocent and more than a little fearful. “I don’t know. But you’ll know, when it happens,” was the answer her son, her son in the future, gave the machine.

The whoosh of air circulating through the vents was the only sound for many heartbeats, until Sarah pushed the terminator away, both of them staggering a few steps back to put several feet between them. “Get out of my sight,” she snarled.

Cameron gave a short nod of acknowledgment and then was gone, her boots rattling the plating and then down the ladder into the silo. Meanwhile, Sarah flopped back into the chair and stared at the white expanse of the ceiling, her mind racing as a renewed sense of urgency to escape the silo overtook her. It was bad enough that she was trapped with a terminator, but it was worse, much worse to be trapped with one who could evolve past her programming.

Sarah was sure she didn’t want to be imprisoned long enough to learn what a killing machine could evolve into. She did know that Cameron was suddenly much more dangerous than she had believed and that she had to get out of there and destroy their terminator-protector as quickly as possible.

It was several hours later before she sought out Cameron again. The apprehension she felt in approaching the terminator again was overruled by practicality. She had been researching for some time, working out a plan, and she had finally come to the conclusion that she need Cameron’s help, so she found herself walking down the long corridor. Even though the sounds of her passage still echoed through the silo, it still took calling the terminator’s name twice before a soft “Yes?” reached Sarah.

The beam of Sarah’s flashlight found Cameron kneeling three platforms below, her eyes glowing with an inhuman blue light. Sarah controlled the shiver of fear that went through her body and asked, conversationally, “What are you doing?”

“Examining the vents for outside access.”

“Find anything?”

Sarah thought she could hear a sigh in the terminator’s voice. “No.”

“Come up here.” A few seconds later Cameron stepped off the ladder. She eyed Sarah warily and kept her distance, her hand still wrapped around the steel support.

“Does this thing work?” Sarah asked, gesturing with her head toward the silo.

“Work?”

“Yeah, work. Get power? Open?” She pointed up at the concrete above their heads.

Cameron’s gaze followed Sarah’s finger, trying to puzzle out her meaning. “There is power to the silo.”

“Good.” Sarah turned and headed down the tunnel. “Come on, missy.” At the control room, she leaned over a manual propped up on a console. “Launch procedures,” she explained. Cameron stared at the page and then swiveled her head to stare at Sarah. “We can initiate a launch to open the missile doors.” Sarah smiled triumphantly.

Cameron looked vaguely dismayed at the plan, her mouth a hard line as she scrutinized several pages. “The launch sequence may be disabled. Or alert someone that we are here.”

“Do you have a better idea?” Sarah challenged. She waved a dismissive hand at the stack of manuals. “We haven’t found anything in these manuals, no emergency procedures, no schematics, nothing.” Her voice rose at the last word. “We’ve been in here for, what, 30…”

“24”

“…24 hours and we’re no closer to getting out.” Cameron watched her silently, her hazel eyes cold and empty, and a tide of anger washed over Sarah. “I don’t plan on being stuck in here another 24. So unless you have a better idea, we’re doing this.” Sarah’s fist connected with a control panel with a resounding bang to emphasize her words.

Cameron’s eyes narrowed in on Sarah’s hand and the corners of her mouth turned down, like the beginnings of a frown. Sarah was surprised by the expression, enough that her anger faded to the background for a moment. “What?”

“You will injure you hand.”

“It’s fine,” Sarah growled, even though a steady, throbbing pain pulsed through the bones of her hand. “Now what do we need to do to do this?”

They worked steadily, moving through the complicated launch sequence carefully. At the last second, as Sarah was about to press the last few buttons before turning the key, a spark jumped out of the control panel and a mild electric shock buzzed through Sarah’s body. She jumped back a second before the whole console went up in flames. Cameron was there in an instant, stepping between Sarah and the flames, one of the several fire extinguishers that ringed the room in her hands.

When the smoke cleared under a coating of chemicals, Sarah surveyed the damage. “Can we try it again?” Cameron peeled back the blackened steel and peered into the back of the console.

“The entire console will have to be rewired. It will take several days before we can try it again.”

“Days?” Something inside Sarah snapped and the sickening smell of burned flesh added to the chemicals as she slammed her fists into the super-heated metal of the control panel. “We don’t have days. I want to be out of here now!”

Cameron moved between Sarah and the console, and Sarah rained the blows onto her flesh instead. Wrapping her arms around Sarah’s back, Cameron pulled the struggling woman closer, restraining her, as she maneuvered them to the ground.

“You must calm down.” Cameron’s voice came from somewhere near Sarah’s left ear, the breath soft and warm, as the terminator cradled her, gently yet firmly, to her body. She made no move to stop Sarah’s fists from pummeling her shoulders, as if she were trying to get Sarah to exhaust herself. “You will make it more difficult to escape and return to John if you are injured.”

And eventually, Sarah did tire and the terminator’s words sunk in. The fight left her, and Sarah slumped forward into the artificial warmth of Cameron’s body and closed her eyes. The very thing she was most afraid of, the thing she wanted to destroy, was holding her and comforting her and worse, she was letting it. She was even enjoying the facsimile of closeness as Cameron’s hold on her loosened from a restraint into an embrace and Cameron’s fingers traced soothing circles on her back.

Remembering something Cameron had said the day before, Sarah leaned back to survey the reddened skin along Cameron’s shoulders and chest. “Did that hurt?”

Cameron glanced down, and then turned her hazel eyes to Sarah. “It was less intense than a bullet or stab wound, but it compressed the pressure sensors uncomfortably.” She paused for a moment, considering. “Yes, it hurt.”

Sarah didn’t apologize; instead, she tenderly ran a finger along Cameron’s collarbone, where her fists had hammered into the synthetic flesh. “How does this feel?”

“Better.” Cameron seemed to be struggling with the words to describe how it felt. “Lighter.” Finally she settled on: “Nice.”

Sarah leaned her head forward once more, her fingers still caressing skin that felt real, and so human that if she hadn’t known, she would have been fooled. Curled there in Cameron’s arms, she let her exhausted body relax and her mind go blank. She didn’t know what to think anyway.


	4. Chapter 4

Eventually, the cold seeped up from the floor; Sarah pulled back and started to disentangle herself from Cameron, surprised at how reluctant she was. It had been a long time since someone had held her, since she had allowed someone to hold her, and the fact that it was a terminator was not lost on Sarah, but neither was the fact that it felt good to lose herself in the warmth and comfort of a body, even one artificially warmed.

It was a moment of weakness, certainly, but she spent so much time being strong, living up to the larger-than-life image John had of her, that moments like this were rare. Sometimes she wondered what damage was being wrought to her psyche in trying to live up to John’s expectations; he asked, no, he demanded, that she stop Judgment Day, change the future, for him, for everyone, and rather than disappoint him or tell him it may not be possible, she dedicated herself to trying to do that. But then, John wasn’t entirely to blame. She was the one who first created the image that John now idealized. In the early years, she had made herself hard as a way of coping; it was only later, as she grew older, that she realized that hard could also be brittle. Sarah remembered trying to pull the trigger as Miles pleaded with her and feeling that strong, steel core she thought she had created shatter like glass.

Even rarer than a moment of weakness was someone not judging her for it. Maybe because she had so little experience with humans and their emotions, Cameron didn’t have the expectation that Sarah had to be strong all the time in order to be strong at all. She certainly understood that Sarah could be helped and even held, and Sarah rested her hand on Cameron’s cheek for a second in a silent gesture of thanks. Cameron seemed reluctant to let go as well, initially resisting when Sarah tried to pull away but finally releasing her hold and allowing Sarah to stand.

Just as Sarah straightened, a powerful cramp rippled up her calf and she grabbed for her leg, nearly overbalancing. “Damn it,” she growled as she collapsed into the chair. She clawed at the fatigues, trying to pull them up so she could massage the muscle that felt like it was twisting into knots. Soft, sure fingers met hers as Cameron eased the boot off and slid her hands up under Sarah’s pant leg.

Sarah stared as Cameron began to work on easing the cramp, a look of utter concentration on the terminator’s face as her fingers dug into the muscle. Her hands were blazing, hotter than a human’s, and Sarah realized that Cameron must have done something to increase her body temperature. The cramp migrated down into Sarah’s foot and her toes began twitching uncontrollably, and Sarah gritted her teeth as her whole lower leg seized. Cameron was there, rubbing the ball of Sarah’s foot with her thumb while her other hand worked on Sarah’s calf muscles, and the spasm began to ease.

Relaxing into the chair as the pain in her leg became bearable, Sarah watched the dark head bent over her leg. A strand of hair fell forward, and Sarah’s fingers were almost touching Cameron before Sarah realized what she was doing and stopped her hand in mid-air. The terminator didn’t seem to notice the hasty retreat of her fingers, but Sarah could feel a blush creep up her neck and heat her cheeks.

To fill the suddenly uncomfortable silence and to get an answer to a question that had been nagging her since their earlier conversation, Sarah asked, “Why? Why do you want to take care of me?” Cameron’s hands stilled for a moment, and then she continued to knead the pain away. “Is it because I’m part of the mission or because of that evolution thing you were talking about?”

Cameron slid both her hands down to Sarah’s foot, carefully working out the kinks, seemingly intent on her task. Just when Sarah thought she wouldn’t answer, she did. “Both.” She eased Sarah’s foot down and stood up abruptly. “You need to drink more water and take some potassium to avoid cramps.” Then she wheeled around and was gone, leaving a puzzled Sarah in her wake.

A few seconds later, she pushed off the chair and followed the terminator up the stairs, limping a little on her sore leg. “Cameron?”

The terminator was standing in front of the refrigerator with the door open, looking like indecisive teenager in search of a snack. Sarah’s lips quirked up at the sight. “You should eat. It’s been several hours since your last meal.”

“I can…” The look Cameron directed at her was decidedly annoyed, and Sarah threw up her hands in mock-surrender and took a step back. Cameron was apparently very serious about the ‘taking care of her’ thing, Sarah thought in amusement. A little relieved at a moment of levity after the serious turn their interaction had taken, Sarah decided to wait before questioning the terminator further.

Cameron busied herself with removing several items from the refrigerator, including spinach, tomatoes, apples, and two different types of melon. She began to, precisely and expertly, chop and dice the assorted vegetables and fruit. “A salad?” questioned Sarah, a teasing note to her voice.

“Spinach is high in potassium,” Cameron explained as she added a handful of pecans.

“Okay, Julia.” Cameron stopped her preparation to turn her full attention to a grinning Sarah, a look of what could be called trepidation on her face. “Julia Child. A famous chef,” Sarah supplied helpfully, trying to keep from bursting out into full-fledged laughter at the dismay on Cameron’s face. With a slight shake of her head, Cameron returned to her task, pointedly ignoring Sarah. She slid a plate across the table in front of Sarah, who picked up her fork with a decided lack of enthusiasm.

It wasn’t bad, considering it was salad, thought Sarah, although she didn’t voice the thought. Instead, she decided to return to her earlier line of questioning, “So why the abrupt departure?”

Cameron didn’t look up from where she was neatly cubing a cantaloupe. “You became angry and frightened the last time we spoke about my evolution. I didn’t think it was a good idea to continue the conversation.”

Sarah took another bite as she considered the terminator’s words. She continued to be surprised by the nuances of Cameron’s responses. It was, after all, very human to avoid an uncomfortable topic of conversation. She voiced the thought, “You’re so different. From the others. The first terminator was purely a killing machine, relentless, driven. He killed Kyle.” Sarah paused as she remembered the medics closing the body bag over his sightless, staring eyes. “He very nearly killed me.”

“He caused the injury to your leg.”

“Yeah.” She remembered that too, the agonizing pain of the shattered pieces of bone rubbing together as she pulled her leg through the gate, the feel of those cold metal fingers tightening on her neck. She shook her head to clear it of the images.

“The second terminator, the one sent back to protect John, he was more like you. John taught him slang and how to high-five.” She smiled a little at the memory of her son and the terminator under the Mexican sun. “But he was always mechanical and stiff; he never seemed human. Not like you.” There was a hint of accusation in Sarah’s voice. “You’re… fluid. The things you learn, you incorporate them into your interactions smoothly, like they become a part of you rather than a piece of added programming. Is that because of what John did?”

Cameron placed a bottle of water and a bowl of melon in front of Sarah. “I don’t know.” She didn’t look happy with the answer.

“And you look different, too. All the terminators, even Cromartie and the others, look like big, bulky men.” Sarah had a sudden thought. “In the future, did you see other terminators? Were there others that John reprogrammed?”

“Yes.”

“Did they, were they, like you? Small, female…?”

“No.”

“Did John change them, the way he changed you?”

“No.”

“So why you? Why did John choose you? Why did he send you back?”

Cameron now looked decidedly uncomfortable. She stood with her eyes fixed on the table until she felt Sarah’s gaze on her. “I do not know.” She turned, carrying the knife and the cutting board to the sink.

“Do you remember was it was like before John changed your programming so you could evolve?”

The knife clattered in the sink and Sarah caught a splash of red where the terminator had cut herself. Cameron ran water over her hand. “Yes,” was her soft reply.

“What was it like?”

“Structured. Orderly.” There was a long pause. “Isolated. I didn’t see the world, only the mission. Everything narrowed down to a single focus and anything outside of that focus didn’t exist.” Cameron stopped washing the dishes and turned off the water, but she did not turn to face Sarah. “Nothing related to me; it was all about how things, people, related to the mission, how they could be used to achieve the goals set out by my programming. I… did not exist.”

There was something wistful in Cameron’s voice that prompted Sarah to ask, “Did you like it better?”

Cameron didn’t answer; instead she moved to the coffee maker, dumping the grounds and filling the pot with fresh water.

“Cameron?”

“John could undo it. He could change my programming back.” Her voice was back to a bland monotone, so at odds with the enormous change she seemed to be proposing.

“What?”

“You are afraid. Of me. Of what I might become. When we get out, John can undo what he did. He can make me back into a machine.”

Sarah sat, stunned. The image of Cameron, her chip removed, motionless, helpless, flashed through her mind’s eye, and the image was both tempting and sickening. Cameron had to know that Sarah was thinking about destroying her, and she was offering herself up for it. Once the chip was out, Sarah could do anything she wanted. The offer was either a brilliant ploy or an amazingly selfless act.

In fact, even if John simply reprogrammed her, she, Cameron, the sentience she had achieved, would be destroyed. When Cameron turned to face Sarah, Sarah could tell she understood that. “Why?” Sarah asked.

“You are afraid of me. Of what I might do. I do not want you to fear me.” Her eyes flickered down and then up again, locking on Sarah’s. “I do not want to hurt you.”

Sarah remembered the fear in the terminator’s voice when she asked what she would become. Sarah wasn’t the only one fearful about Cameron’s evolution, she realized: Cameron was too.

“It would be better, if I were a machine.”

Sarah lapsed into a thoughtful silence as Cameron set a cup of coffee at her elbow and disappeared into the sleeping area. It was an awe-inspiring offer, if it was legitimate. Cameron, this Cameron, the one who had stopped her from harming herself and held her, would cease to exist and in her place… Sarah couldn’t repress a shudder of revulsion at the thought.

She dropped her forehead into her hands, raking her nails through her hair, confused by the contradictory nature of her thoughts. She could easily stomach the thought of destroying Cameron, of crushing her chip and incinerating her body, but the idea of seeing a soulless, empty machine staring out of those hazel eyes filled her with disgust. But how could she do one and not the other? Weren’t they both the same thing?

But they weren’t, not really. If Cameron were gone, Sarah would… miss her, perhaps even mourn her. But Cameron present yet not Cameron, that Sarah couldn’t do. Not even to a machine, or at least not to Cameron. It was all or nothing where Cameron was concerned, and Sarah wasn’t sure which she wanted.

Hearing Cameron returning, Sarah raised her head and watched as Cameron made her way across the floor; there was something different, something wrong, with how Cameron walked. She had lost some of her fluidity; the sway of her hips and the light placement of her steps was gone and in its place was a stiff, awkward gait. It came to Sarah in a blink: Cameron was trying to act more machine-like. It was as if she was trying to be what Sarah wanted her to be, to live up to Sarah’s expectations the same way Sarah tried to live up to John’s. This, too, was scarily human and oddly endearing.

Cameron set another pill cup beside the cup of coffee and turned to leave. Sarah stopped Cameron with a light touch on her wrist. “You don’t have to be anything but,” and here she almost slipped and said ‘who’ but she caught herself in time, “what you are.”

Cameron’s hazel eyes were unreadable as her gaze rested first on Sarah’s fingers and then on Sarah’s face. “You don’t like what I am,” she stated without rancor.

Sarah caressed the soft skin, watching as her fingers stroked up the underside of Cameron’s forearm and down again, before lifting her head to meet Cameron’s eyes. She had no idea why she suddenly wanted to touch Cameron or what prompted her to whisper, “In time, I might grow to like it.”

This time, when Cameron turned to go, Sarah let her.

Something had just happened between them, but Sarah was at a loss to explain what. And now, when her thoughts should be on getting out of the silo, was not the time to figure it out. There would be time later to decide what to do about Cameron. Alone, without even the echo of Cameron’s passage down the stairs, Sarah felt the chill of the vast space and rubbed her arms. Remembering the stockpile of clothes in the sleeping area, she hoped that someone thought to provide something heavier than a t-shirt.

Searching through the small chest of drawers in the wardrobe, Sarah found several military-issue sweaters and a black web pistol belt with a holster and ammo pouch. She pulled on the sweater, adjusted the belt, and snapped it around her waist, stowing her 9mm and adding a few extra clips to equal out the weight.

Warm, well-armed, and freshly-caffeinated, Sarah headed back down to finish reading the last of the manuals. As she was about to sit down in the worn chair, a flash of white in the demolished safe caught her eye. It was a small manual, compared to the others, laying flat in the deepest recesses, but the title, “MCC Titan II Silo Emergency Procedures,” stood out in stark relief on the pale blue cover. The cover itself was not sprinkled with dust and bits of concrete from Cameron’s demolition of the safe the day before, and alarm bells began to go off in Sarah’s head. She skimmed through several pages as an awful truth revealed itself.

A noise by the entrance to the control room snapped her attention to the terminator, who was standing just inside. Cameron’s eyes narrowed in on manual in her hands, and then raised to Sarah’s face. Her bland mask was in place, but Sarah could see a flicker of apprehension in her eyes. Sarah wasn’t even sure when she had pulled her gun, but its weight was reassuring in her hand.

“There’s a way out. You knew. You locked me in here deliberately, didn’t you?” Cameron didn’t answer, but a frown pulled at the corners of her mouth. “Didn’t you?” Sarah snarled.

“Yes.” Cameron’s reply was barely audible, even in the deathly quiet that surrounded them.

There was no mistaking the threat in Sarah’s voice as she demanded, “Let me out.”

“I can’t. The door is not operational.”

“Why not?”

“I disabled it the first day.” Cameron’s voice, even in betrayal, was light and melodic to Sarah’s ears. “While you slept.”

This matter-of-fact response felt like a punch in the gut, and Sarah felt nauseous as she realized thoroughly she had been deceived, how completely she had been drawn in. She had believed a machine and the implications were staggering. “I let you in. I let you protect John. You were just waiting…”

Cameron took a step forward, shaking her head emphatically. “No, I…”

The retort was deafening in the vast space, and Sarah’s ears rang as the weapon bucked in her hand. The first shot spun Cameron back, and away, from the entrance; the second knocked her down. Seeing her opening, Sarah sprinted past the terminator, down the long corridor, to the silo, the blood beating in her ears and the sound of her passage echoing through the space.

She scrambled down several flights before she paused, drawing in great, gulping breaths and listening for the sound of boots above her head.


	5. Chapter 5

Sarah didn’t know how long she sat, in darkness, in silence, before she heard Cameron approach. The dull, echoing thud seemed to continue for an intolerably long time before a silhouette appeared at the top of the silo. “Sarah….?”

That was the only word the terminator got out before Sarah snapped off three more rounds, her arms braced against a metal strut to improve her aim. At least two rounds struck the terminator, the sound of metal on metal muffled by the artificial skin, and Cameron retreated. Sarah could imagine Cameron standing at the top of the stairs, staring at her wounds with a look of surprise, and the image gave Sarah a sense of satisfaction, until it changed and a red light gleamed in the depths of that doe-eyed hazel. Sarah shuddered, her anger warring with her fear. Anger, at herself, for ever trusting a machine, and fear at where that kindness had led her. She had no idea what Cameron had planned for her, but her task had just gotten exponentially harder: Sarah now had to incapacitate a terminator with only a handgun and her wits before she could even think about trying to free herself from the silo.

Sarah’s thoughts immediately turned to John. Was this a ploy, had Cameron been working with Skynet all along, had she trapped Sarah in order to leave John exposed, vulnerable? The thought that he might already be dead slammed into her gut and her eyes watered as she contemplated her worst fear. But why now? Why this way? Cameron had been with them for months; she could have betrayed them, killed John, numerous times in the intervening time. Unless it was all part of a plan by Skynet that Sarah couldn’t fathom, some way to use her against John, manipulate him in some way. 

That would explain why Cameron seemed so determined to take care of her; Sarah had to be alive for the plan to work. Or else… her thoughts took a scary turn as she considered the possibility that Cameron wasn’t acting rationally. Cameron had said she was evolving, that John had fiddled with her programming. Maybe she had taken something John had said, like when he had teasingly told Cameron to ‘take care of the old lady’ when they left the house, too literally and had locked Sarah in as a way of following his orders. That might explain the…

Sarah’s head snapped up in sudden horror. Cameron was a machine… she couldn’t… but there was the touch on the lips, the way Cameron had held her, the care and hyperawareness of her moods. But the very idea was crazy; Cameron might be evolving, but it would take a major glitch in her programming to make her think she was in love with Sarah. It was impossible, Sarah thought, even as a small sliver of disappointment made itself known. I didn’t, I couldn’t have… led her on? Sarah racked her brain for anything she might have done to make Cameron fall in… the thought was absurd and Sarah couldn’t finish it. She gave a small but definite shake of her head. There was no way she was locked down in an abandoned missile silo because she had inadvertently caused an evolving robot to go mad with love. 

Dropping her head, she scrubbed at her face ruthlessly, feeling the calluses on her palm scrape over her skin. The why wasn’t important, she decided. She had to figure a way out of there and fast before John, and she refused to consider the possibility that he could be dead, tried to enact a rescue. After all, if Cameron had her wires crossed, who knew how she would react if her son showed up.

Climbing up the ladder, Sarah peered over the edge of the main platform, seeing no sign of Cameron down the long stretch of corridor. What she did see was the metal stained with red, Cameron’s blood slowly drying and clotting, and Sarah’s lips split into a feral grin. Evil or insane, it didn’t matter. Sarah was going to take her apart or die trying. Scrambling over the top of the platform, the quick movement earning her a protest from her aching leg, Sarah searched the changing room just outside the silo. She found a sling tool bag and she stuffed anything she could find in, even the two oxygen tanks. Peeking around the corner and not seeing Cameron, Sarah sprinted back across the platform and down the ladder, wincing as the sound of her boots rattled the metal plating.

Once she was down several flights, Sarah stopped and took inventory of her supplies; she had a flashlight, whatever tools that were lying around the room, and two oxygen tanks. Eyeing the faded stencil that still clearly marked the tanks as FLAMMABLE, she wondered if she could use them to ignite her adversary. But then, flames and explosions weren’t enough to stop or even slow a terminator for long, and she had no desire to reveal the gleaming metal skeleton that resided beneath Cameron’s flesh. 

Sarah spent a few hours searching around the silo for anything to augment her cache of possible weapons, an ear cocked for any sound from overhead. Even in the chill of the silo, Sarah felt sweat bead on her forehead and drip down into her eyes as she restlessly circled the bottom of the pit, her very own 9th circle of hell as she labeled it. A restless energy drove her, despite her fatigue and aching body, and she accepted the pains as punishment for trusting a machine in the first place. The depths of the betrayal still rankled her; she had never trusted the other terminator-protector, never fully, but all it took was a pretty face and hazel eyes to make her drop her guard. 

A sound alerted her that Cameron was returning, and she pulled her gun and braced herself into a corner, her body once again protesting the rough treatment. She had no idea what the terminator had been doing in the interim, but she wondered if the real battle was about to start. But Cameron didn’t appear at the top of the silo; her footsteps came to the door, paused, then retreated. Silence filled the silo once more.

Intrigued in spite of herself and wary of a trap, Sarah once again forced herself up the ladder; at the top, she spied what the terminator had left: a bottle of water and a pre-packaged hiking meal. The thirst at the back of her throat suddenly raged, and Sarah was halfway up over the edge of the platform and reaching for the water when she caught sight of Cameron standing in the door of the control room, watching her. No emotion seemed to light or animate those blank hazel eyes. Seeing Sarah hesitate, Cameron stepped back and out of her line of sight, but the move made Sarah more suspicious rather than less. There had to be a reason Cameron wanted her to take the supplies; maybe they were drugged, poisoned, since it was obvious that Cameron’s goal was to capture her, not kill her. After all, if Cameron wanted Sarah dead, all she had to do was climb down the silo and kill her. 

Sarah forcibly pulled back her hand, leaving the water sitting.

And so it began: at regular intervals, Cameron would walk down the corridor and leave food and water outside the open door to the silo while Sarah watched and waited for the moment the terminator’s routine varied, signaling an end to the pretense and the beginning of the battle.

But it never came; for almost a day, Cameron, like clockwork, every four hours, deposited more supplies at the door, adding to the growing pile. The gnawing thirst was painful by now, Sarah’s throat raw when she swallowed, but she didn’t allow herself to contemplate the water sitting a hundred feet above her head. But Cameron’s routine gave her an idea, and she spent the next interval planning her attack.

By the time she heard Cameron’s boots in the corridor, Sarah was ready. The climb up to level three had exhausted her, and her head felt feverish as she wiped the back of her hand across her forehead. This close, her hands trembled at the thought of the water just a few feet away. She hefted the oxygen tank and peered up into the mirror she had ripped off the wall of the changing room and positioned so she could see Cameron’s approach. The terminator was near the end of the corridor, already stooping to put the items in her hands on the floor, when Sarah swung into action, leaping up and over the edge of the platform and rushing into the deceptively slight frame of the terminator. They went down in a heap, Cameron’s hazel eyes puzzled as Sarah swung her improvised weapon off her back. She pressed the oxygen tank squarely against the terminator’s forehead, swinging a knife to puncture the tank while she threw herself back and away.

The resounding thud of the tank slamming Cameron’s head into metal rang in Sarah’s ears as she lay, panting. For a second, nothing moved and Sarah thought maybe she had won, or at least incapacitated the terminator, until she saw, out of the corner of her eye, Cameron’s fingers curl, then her arms lift, as she sat up. There was a mark and a cut on her forehead bled freely, but other than that, she was no the worse for wear. She studied Sarah curiously as she rose to her feet, making no moves that could be construed as threatening. It was unfair, Sarah thought as she trained her gun on Cameron, casting her eyes back toward the safety of the silo and measuring the distance.

A movement from Cameron snapped her focus back to the terminator, but she had just moved to press her hand to her forehead and stem the tide of blood that was dripping through her eyebrow and down her cheek. A flash of sympathy rushed through Sarah as she realized that it looked like Cameron was crying tears of blood, but she ruthlessly squashed the emotion. “Why are you doing this? Let me go!”

Cameron frowned in seemingly genuine sadness. “I can’t. Sarah, I…”

“Then kill me,” Sarah demanded, her finger tightening on the trigger. Cameron looked stricken at the thought and she mutely shook her head in denial. Sarah’s teeth clenched in sudden anger, and she screamed, “Terminate me, fucker! What the hell are you waiting for?” 

“Sarah…” Cameron began, but the ear-piercing explosions of Sarah’s gun firing at close range cut her off and flung her down to the floor like a rag doll. Sarah didn’t wait; she clambered her way across the platform and down the ladder in an instant.

***

Sarah had no idea how long she had been sitting in the eerie half-light of the silos emergency lights. These periods of lethargy were increasing, she realized. It wasn’t surprising; her sleep had consisted of infrequent cat-naps and her last meal had been the salad that Cameron had made for her. The food Cameron had left, even the military rations in air-tight packages, went untouched; likewise the bottles of water. Sarah swallowed, her parched throat raspy and raw, but she refused to touch anything the terminator supplied. 

But she didn’t fool herself. The nausea cramping her stomach and the weakness in her limbs was a precursor to full-blown dehydration, and if she didn’t do something drastic, and soon, Cameron would only have to retrieve her unconscious body from the bottom of the silo in order to capture her. Sarah wondered if that had been the terminator’s strategy all along, to wait Sarah out. 

If it was, it was working, Sarah thought with bitterness. It had been almost three days now, and Sarah’s attempts to overcome the terminator had gotten nowhere. Her limited supplies couldn’t be used to build a weapon even close to taking out Cameron. The exhaustion was clouding her thoughts, auditory hallucinations were beginning to breed in the darkness. Sometimes she could hear Cameron climbing down the ladder for her; other times, she heard John calling for her. He hadn’t come to rescue her, though, and it was over six days since they had been locked in. In her darkest moments, she admitted that the only thing that could have kept him from coming to find her was death, and the thought caused a wave of despair to wash over her. 

She massaged her forehead where it rested in her hand, trying to coax a plan out of her confused and increasingly incoherent thoughts. It was tempting to just give up, let sleep claim her, and her eyes drooped at the thought.

The gun held loosely in her hand dipped, striking the platform with a resounding clink. Her eyes sprang open to focus first on the gun and then on the metal beneath her boots. A plan began to form in her mind, and she pulled herself up in a renewed sense of purpose. Ignoring the trembling sluggishness in her limbs, she climbed the ladder one last time.

It took her nearly two hours to wire the door, putting her boobytrap into place, but she finished just in time. Cameron, on her usual rounds, began to walk down the corridor as Sarah gave her pocket one last pat to make sure she had the tools she needed and then tightened her grip on the edge of the platform. Cameron had to have noticed that the door to the silo was now closed and had to be analyzing the possible reasons in her head. She must have missed one, because the slight zip on the other side of the door and the cascade of sparks over Sarah’s head told her her plan had worked.

She had 120 seconds, Sarah thought, as she opened the door and knelt beside the motionless body of the electrocuted terminator. Sarah turned Cameron’s head to the side, ignoring a subtle twisting in her gut as she noted the red healing scar across Cameron’s forehead. With trembling hands, whether from exhaustion or adrenaline Sarah wasn’t sure, she began her makeshift surgery, almost tearing a hole in Cameron’s flesh as she hurried to expose the smooth metal cover above Cameron’s chip. 

She bit back a curse as her fingers fumbled with the knife, dropping it as she shifted it to pry the cover off. Too slow, she thought, too slow, as she exposed Cameron’s chip. The pliers caught as she tried to pull them free, and she heard a ripping in her pocket as she yanked them.

A blue light flashed in Cameron’s eyes just as Sarah got the pliers free, and she gripped the edge of the chip, trying to twist and pull at the same time. But a hand stronger than steel grabbed her wrist as Cameron’s head turned, her hazel eyes showing an odd disappointment lurking in their depths as she removed the pliers from Sarah’s suddenly nerveless fingers. Cameron flung her away with negligible ease and Sarah skidded several feet before coming to rest, seeing Cameron rise to her feet to block the entrance to the silo. 

Sarah pulled her gun and aimed it, but it was no use. The terminator had won and there was nothing she could do about it. 

“Whatever your plan is…” Sarah snarled as Cameron knelt to retrieve the missing cover, “you can do it without me.” She saw Cameron’s eyes widen as Sarah nestled the barrel of the gun against her own temple, heard her boots scramble on the metal plating as Cameron tried to gain traction and speed. For once, Sarah was ahead of the game, she thought with satisfaction as her finger increased the pressure on the trigger. A loud bang and a sudden weight, like a giant hand crushing her, smashed Sarah into darkness.


	6. Chapter 6

Sarah came to in a world swirling with confusion and pain. A hand gripped her wrist; they were tying her down again. She struggled weakly, the pain shooting through her body nearly blinding her. Through her tears she could make out shapes, people, a mummer of voices: big burly men in white, slick glass for eyes, a thin trickle of spit down her cheek, a girl with sad eyes, stronger than the others, her son, telling her it was okay while a figure out of her nightmares loomed over them both. A familiar weight pulling on her wrist, pulling her down, the chill of metal under her fevered fingers… “No,” she protested, shaking her head, “don’t.” 

“It’s okay.” The words were a quiet whisper, but rather than sooth her, they launched her into further panic. Sarah yanked and twisted, ignoring the pain stabbing through her as she wrenched her shoulder.

“Please, don’t,” she begged as a restraint tugged her other arm back and an all-too-familiar feeling of helplessness surged and drove the breath from her body. “The machines… will get me, get my son,” she explained as metal flashed beneath a wave of mousey brown hair and blue blossomed in a sea of hazel. Sarah felt the prick of a needle in her arm, bringing the poison that numbed her mind and made her forget her son. “No!” she screamed as she dug her heels in and tried to leverage herself off the bed, the tethers on her wrists holding her back. The taste of metal flooded her mouth, choking her, whether from the drugs or blood from her bitten tongue, she couldn’t tell. “No…” Her voice trailed off as the world grew fuzzy and her body seemed to drop from a great height, never hitting the bottom.

“I’m sorry.” The words were the last thing Sarah was conscious of, a quiet undertone that she couldn’t make out, like the rustle of grass underfoot, before she drifted.

Pain was the first thing to penetrate Sarah’s consciousness the next time she woke; a dull throbbing that began at her right temple and radiated across her forehead and down her jaw. It pounded with the beat of Sarah’s heart so that every part of her head hurt, even her eyes, which felt gritty and swollen in their sockets. She refused to open them, but she couldn’t close her ears so she drifted there for several minutes simply listening to the faint buzz of the overheads and the muted swoosh of air circulating in the tomb-like silence of the silo. For a moment, it was peaceful—swoosh, breath, swoosh, breath—and the world was kept at a distance. Then a flash of memory, and another: the cold muzzle of the gun pressed against her temple, the terminator closing the distance, her finger pulling the trigger.

Sarah didn’t feel dead; rather, she felt like someone had killed her and then reanimated her corpse after several days of cold storage. 

The raw scratchiness of her throat was familiar, as was the pressure at her wrists. She risked opening her eyes and for a moment the world spun dizzily before resolving into the underside of the top bunk a few feet from her face. Blinking away tears and fighting a wave of nausea, Sarah raised her head a few inches, nearly dropping it back to the pillow as the throbbing increased exponentially. It took her a moment to focus and realize what she was seeing, but when she did, it confirmed everything she feared: wide white strips of fabric were looped around her wrists, tying her to a metal bunk. A neat X of surgical tape secured an IV needle a few inches above her wrist. 

Her eyes traveled from her arm to Cameron, standing stock-still and wordless in the doorway, watching Sarah warily and appearing afraid to enter the room. Sarah recoiled, or tried to, but her bonds held her firmly in place.

“Let me go,” Sarah rasped around the rawness in her throat, tugging on the restraints to emphasize her point. Her muscles felt weak and thoroughly depleted, but that didn’t stop her from struggling. 

“You tried to kill yourself.” A worried sadness seeped into Cameron’s tone, mirroring the expression in her eyes.

“And you stopped me.” It wasn’t a question; Sarah remembered the terminator reaching for her arm, the gun deflected, a burning across her forehead. She gritted her teeth and wrenched on the cloth tying her to the bunk, nearly screaming in agony as her struggles unleashed a cascade a pain through her body. “Fucking machine. Untie me.”

“I can’t.” Cameron braved a step into the room, then another, until she was standing beside the bed and looking down at Sarah. “Not yet. You need to listen to me first.”

“What makes you think I want to hear anything you have to say?” Sarah’s voice grew hoarser as she yelled. She twisted her body, hearing the bone grind in her shoulder. A familiar rage burned in the pit of her stomach as she struggled ineffectually against her bonds, a rage honed in her years of captivity.

Cameron reached out and caught Sarah’s shoulder, pressing her back against the mattress. “You will injure yourself.”

“Don’t touch me, robot,” Sarah snarled, but she was surprised when Cameron snatched her hand back. Sarah lay, panting and exhausted by her futile struggles. 

Cameron held out a bottle of water and a straw, but Sarah glared at the proffered item suspiciously. “If I wanted to drug you, I could,” Cameron pointed out reasonably.

Finally, Sarah took a few small sips, the cool water easing her much abused throat, but her eyes were still fixed on the terminator. “Is that what the IV is for?”

“You were dehydrated and malnourished,” Cameron replied with a hint of accusation in her voice. 

“Gotta keep your lab rat healthy?” Sarah didn’t give Cameron a chance to answer. “You lied to me. You tricked me. You’re a machine.” She hissed the last word between clenched teeth. “I won’t listen to a machine.”

Cameron glanced meaningfully at the restraints that bound Sarah to the bed, but she didn’t comment. “Yes, I lied to you. I tricked you. But you have to listen to me now.”

“I’m not going to be your puppet. You aren’t going to use me against John.” Sarah braced her heels and yanked, feeling the bunk scoot half an inch with her movement. “You can tell Skynet to fuck itself.” 

“I’m not working for Skynet. I’m working for John.”

“Bullshit! You weren’t sent back to protect John. You were sent back to kill him.” Sarah rested her head on the pillow for a moment, her teeth sinking into her lip as she fought a wave of nausea and pain. 

“No, I wasn’t sent to kill John.” Cameron’s words were calm, in an obvious attempt to quiet Sarah. “But I wasn’t sent back to protect John either. That is the first lie I told.” 

“How many?” Sarah snapped, the edge of her anger wavering in the face of her need for answers. “How many lies have you told?”

Cameron regarded her. “Many. But three important ones.” She read Sarah’s expression. “John is safe, as far as I know.” 

“Tell me,” Sarah demanded.

“I was sent back for you.”

For a moment Sarah had a feeling of deja vu, as she heard echoes of Kyle Reese’s voice saying nearly the same words. A new pounding set up shop in the space between her eyes. “For me?”

“My primary mission was to bring you forward in time and lock you in this bunker. Protecting John was my secondary mission.”

“Why?” Sarah growled, her distrust shining clearly in her gaze. 

“Judgment Day.” Cameron spoke the words with finality and Sarah felt her stomach clench. She swallowed the bile that rose in the back of her throat. “Judgment Day…?”

“…happened five days ago.”

Sarah felt the bottom drop out, and a wave of vertigo washed over her. Her head fell back and her eyes squeezed shut. Twisted buildings, dead bodies, and flames, like scenes from a low-budget science fiction movie, flooded her vision, all her nightmares made real. She could feel her body shaking, could hear Cameron’s voice speaking to her but the words were distorted, as if she were speaking from a vast distance or down a long tunnel. Spots danced and sparkled before her eyes, like air bursts exploding and raining fire and destruction. 

“Sarah!” A touch on her shoulder, the touch of a machine, snapped Sarah back to reality and she jerked her shoulder away, a gasp escaping her as the muscles wrenched. 

“Why?” she managed to gasp out. “Why did you bring us forward in time?” All the years, all the time, wasted. “We could have stopped it.”

“No,” Cameron’s voice was soft, almost gentle, as she asserted, “you couldn’t. John tried. He sent people back to stop Skynet many times; he even tried to stop the discovery of atomic weapons.” Sarah’s head shook back and forth in denial, but it didn’t stop the flow of words from the terminator. “It didn’t work. Unlike the science fiction stories that postulate that minute changes can alter the course of history, John discovered that technological evolution is more resilient than he expected. That’s why when you destroyed Cyberdyne and Miles Dyson’s work, you didn’t stop Judgment Day.”

Five days, five days, millions, maybe billions of people died, the world destroyed… It was impossible. There had to have been something… or the terminator had to be lying… Sarah’s eyes snapped open in sudden horror.

“John? Where, you said he was safe…”

“He is. He and Derek Reese left for another bunker not long after we did. They had plenty of time to reach safety before Skynet went online.”

“Why? And why didn’t we all go together?” Sarah’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Why the deception and the lies? Why would John and Derek go off on their own?” It had to be another elaborate falsehood. John, her John, would not abandon her, leave her with this machine.

Cameron shifted her feet and trained her eyes on the floor, steadfastly refusing to meet Sarah’s gaze. “That is the last lie,” she confessed. “You didn’t die of cancer.”

Sarah blinked back the tears that were suddenly in her eyes as she tried to draw a breath. Her body felt paralyzed, numb, cold. She didn’t notice her hands shaking, didn’t see the wild expression in her eyes that belied the calmness of her words. “I what?”

“You didn’t die of cancer. You died on Judgment Day.”

She didn’t… all those tests… no wonder they never found anything… Sarah’s thoughts ran in a million different directions as she tried to contemplate the magnitude of this last truth. She wasn’t dying. Suddenly, it all became apparent to Sarah, a realization as bright and clear as the ocean she had gazed upon the day before the world died. “He sent you back to protect me. To prevent my death.”

“Yes.” 

“Let me go,” Sarah’s voice was quiet, subdued, as she issued her demand, the enormity of all she had been told pressing down on her. In her mind’s eye, images of sand and surf and the feeling of a faint breeze juxtaposed with a fireball boiling the sea and burning sand to glass. She remembered the glimpse of emotion in Cameron’s eyes as they had stood there watching the waves and she realized it had been sadness. Sadness born of the fact that Cameron had known what was coming and kept the information from Sarah. Anger flared, and she rattled the bunk as she yanked on the restraints. “Untie me, damn it!”

There was a squeak of the chair as Cameron stood and leaned over Sarah. Her eyes were on her task, the slicing of the cloth that bound Sarah’s wrist, so Sarah was free to gaze, unsure if she had ever been quite so close to the terminator before. There was a subtle perfection in the imperfections of Cameron’s features, the birthmark that marred the line of her eyebrow, the way her mouth was slightly off-center. Then Cameron pulled back and turned her attention to the other wrist, neatly slicing the last restraint away.

Sarah reached out and gripped the IV, bracing herself as she ripped the needle out of her arm. Cameron’s lips tightened in disapproval, but she didn’t say anything. Nor did Cameron flinch when Sarah reached for the 9mm on the bedside table. Sarah knew from the heft that the clip was empty but the weight in her hand was reassuring nonetheless. She snagged the water bottle and took a few more sips of water. “What happened? How did I die?”

“You were fleeing from the destruction, you and John. There was an explosion. You saved him.”

Sarah drew in a shaky breath, her eyes on the bottle in her hands. “Does John… my John… what does he know about this?”

“John, in the future, made the plan and sent me back. But the final decision was left to your John, in this time.”

Sarah’s head jerked up to stare at the terminator. “What?”

“I told John everything, and Derek Reese too,” here Cameron’s expression turned a little sour at the mention of John’s uncle, “the night before we left. I told him John’s reasoning, the events of Judgment Day, the details of your death. He agreed.”

Sarah felt tears welling in her eyes again. He sent her away to protect her, when it was her job to protect him. “You said he was safe. But you don’t know that, not for sure. Something could have happened, something I could have prevented had I been there…”

“You are his mother. He loves you,” Cameron explained as Sarah cradled her head in her hands, words and images pounding through with every beat of her heart. Even with her eyes closed, the blackness was tinged with red: flames, fire, blood, the gleam of a terminator’s eye. She was supposed to have stopped it, all of it. John had asked her to stop it and she had said she would. She had failed him, failed the world. The machines had won. The gun in her hand dug into her forehead, the cold metal bringing her back to some semblance of reality, but a nightmare reality she couldn’t accept. 

“How do I know?” Sarah muttered into her hands, before raising her head to fix on the machine before her. “How do I know any of this is the truth? Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t I get to make a choice?”

“That was not the mission. The mission was to protect you.”

“Damn good job you did of that!” Sarah snapped. “Why didn’t you tell me all this when you locked me in here in the first place?”

“My orders were to wait until I had confirmed that Judgment Day had happened. John was afraid that you would try to break out and find him if I told you before. This silo did not take a direct hit. I was monitoring radiation levels until they confirmed several nuclear strikes in the region.”

The trembling in Sarah’s hands increased. She looked at Cameron, standing haloed in the light from the fluorescents, her eyes deep in shadow. She looked inhuman, she was inhuman, she was a deceitful machine. “How do I know? How can I trust you?”

“I can show you the radiation monitors. They will confirm…”

Sarah cut her off. “You could have manipulated them to say anything you want them to. This could be some elaborate trick to keep me docile—your pet!—-until you need to use me against John.” She rubbed a palm across her fevered brow. “You have me trapped, your prisoner; you can make up any story to…”

“It’s the truth.”

“Prove it,” Sarah challenged.

There was a pause before Cameron admitted softly, “I can’t. Not in any way you would believe.”

Sarah shook her head emphatically. “Not good enough. Six days ago you locked me away from the world and now you tell me it’s gone. You say John knew, and I’m not dying of cancer. You’re a machine. You were built to lie and now you expect me to believe that you are telling the truth?” Her grip on the gun tightened; if only she had… her head snapped up and her gaze fixed on the red edges of healing skin at Cameron’s temple, half-hidden by the fall of her hair. 

“You want me to trust you?” Sarah snarled the question and Cameron nodded. Sarah jerked her chin at the wound. “Let me deactivate you.”

There was a long moment of tense silence as they stared at each other, Sarah’s green gaze cold and unyielding. 

“Okay.” Cameron’s single word broke the silence and the staring match. She gave Sarah one last look, a plaintive plea for understanding deep in the hazel of her eyes. Cameron walked to the other bunk, the springs groaning under her weight as she settled on the mattress. She arranged her hands across her stomach and looked at Sarah expectantly. 

“Okay? Just like that?” Sarah asked suspiciously. She rose, feeling her legs tremble a little as they took her whole weight. Her eyes blinked to clear her vision as the world threatened to spin again. Her body felt lethargic and uncoordinated, matching the numbness growing in her mind and the exaggerated roar of her own breath in her ears. Sarah’s hand shook perceptibly as she reached for the pocket knife she spied on the bedside table. “You’ll just lay there and let me pull your chip?”

“Yes.”

Frowning skeptically, Sarah stepped closer and knelt by the bed carefully, waiting for a sign that Cameron’s acquiescence was a trap, but the terminator merely watched her curiously. Sarah brushed Cameron’s hair back from the angry wound she had inflicted her first try. Her fingers slid through the silky strands a second time, almost of their own volition. “You don’t have any self-defense programs that will kick in to keep me from doing this?” Sarah asked, remembering the negligible ease with which Cameron had thrown her earlier.

“No. Not with a person I trust.” With that, Cameron turned her head to expose the chip cover, her eyes fixing on a spot in the distance.

Sarah’s hands stilled for a moment as she considered Cameron’s words, but then she set the blade of the knife against the edge of the cover, flipping it back and exposing Cameron’s chip. Gripping the chip with the pliers, Sarah glanced over and saw the almost peaceful blank look on Cameron’s face. Something in the terminator’s bland acceptance of her fate almost penetrated the numbness that cocooned Sarah, but Sarah wasn’t sure if the emotion trying to edge in was anger, disgust, pity, or some combination of the three. 

It didn’t matter anyway, she thought, as her grip tightened on the pliers.

A half-twist of the tool in her hand and the chip was free. Cameron’s eyes darkened perceptively and Sarah held the entirety of Cameron in her fingers. Sarah rose clumsily to her feet and swallowed past the bile in her throat, the hard silicon edges of the chip digging into her palm.


	7. Chapter 7

Sarah found herself in the control room, with no memory of how she got there. Spying a toolbox, she grabbed a hammer and gripped it tightly as she set the chip on the very edge of the console. It was time, once and for all, to rid the world of yet another machine, she thought as she raised the hammer high above her head. The last words Cameron had uttered, “Not with a person I trust,” seemed to hang in the air for just a moment, but Sarah shook her head, roughly dispelling the soft words, before she swung the hammer with all the strength she could muster.

The chip stared up at her, whole and unbroken, beside the dent in the console. The unmarred silver and silicon mocked her, taunted her for her inability to do what had to be done. She raised the hammer and brought it down again, and again, smashing the blue, yellow, and red rainbow of plastic embedded in face of the console, shattering lights and switches. A tiny, jagged piece of metal flew and lodged deep in the muscle of her arm, but she took no notice. Sarah didn’t see the room of computers nor the console in front of her; instead, she saw gleaming metal skeletons stepping over charred bodies and burnt-out buildings, hideous red eyes surveying the damage they had wrought. The crack of shattering plastic and the drumbeat of the hammer assaulted her ears in the quiet, like explosions in a midnight sky. 

Judgment Day… had happened. She hadn’t even known, hadn’t stopped it—hell, she had probably slept through the whole damn thing. And now, barely 100 feet above her head, death and destruction ravaged. The world had died and she had lived through it.

Mindlessly, Sarah struck out, swinging wildly with the hammer, crushing components along the wall of computers that ringed the room. Bits of plastic were strewn in her hair as she rampaged, taking out her helplessness and rage on the assorted machinery. Her breath came in deep gasps and wheezed out of her lungs, filling her ears like the shriek of a thousand missiles gone ballistic and streaking through the sky. Every crash of the hammer exploded buildings and cars before her eyes, and when the hammer slipped from her grasp and flew across the room, she attacked with her bare hands, clawing and prying at the unyielding metal. Fingernails cracked and splintered, but Sarah took no notice through the blood-red haze that enveloped her vision. She was manic, mindless, lost in madness, destroying the only machines she could...

When Sarah came to herself, she was leaned back against the wall, her head clutched in her hands, sweating and trembling despite the chill air of the bunker. The heel of her hand felt like pulp, crushed and torn, from her assault on the machines, and a single drop of blood beaded, then dripped from her palm to the floor between her feet. Sarah opened her eyes, not really seeing the wreckage that surrounded her; instead, she fastened on a thin slice of silver amid the destroyed machinery and broken lights. Cameron’s chip, lying undamaged on the floor beside the smashed console. Death and destruction surrounded Sarah, yet that small sliver of silicon survived unscathed. It hardly seemed fair.

On her hands and knees, Sarah crawled over to the chip, ignoring the plastic that dug into her palms. She stared at it for a long moment with narrowed eyes, as if the force of her gaze could obliterate it, but it seemed impervious to her powers. Unsure where the hammer had flown and too tired to look for it, Sarah grabbed the chip up off the floor and gripped it tightly. She staggered to her feet on unsteady legs and headed up the stairs, her body exhausted and her head throbbing. 

Sarah stopped dead in the doorway to the sleeping quarters; she had forgotten about Cameron’s body, lying on the bunk next to hers. The cold empty hazel gaze seemed to fix on Sarah, and she shivered as a ghost touch crept up her spine. But she was too tired to do anything about it, so Sarah dropped the chip beside the 9mm and settled into the bunk, deliberately turning her back on Cameron’s body just a few feet away from her. She tucked her arm under a pillow and closed her eyes, willing herself into an exhausted, dreamless sleep.

For once, Sarah didn’t wake to a nightmare; instead, she swam out of a deep sleep and blinked her eyes open to stare directly into the face of death—or at least Cameron’s dead eyes. Startled, she reached for the gun under her pillow and came up empty. There was no gun; she hadn’t put one there. For a moment, she panicked, an automatic response to the absence of a weapon in her hands. Then she realized: she didn’t need it, didn’t need the reassuring weight in her hands like a security blanket. She was locked in; she was alone; she was… safe. Sarah exhaled, slumping back to the pillow and rolling over to stare at the criss-cross of springs that supported the top bunk as an alien feeling washed over her.

Drawing in another deep breath, Sarah exhaled again, trying to dispel an odd jumpy sensation in her gut, the cause of which it took her a minute to put her finger on. It was a feeling of complete and utter lack. As she lay there, she realized it was over. The machines had won—game, set, match—and nothing she had done had made a damn bit of difference in the end. 

For sixteen years, she had lived with the pressure of the future rushing toward her like an out-of-control freight train. Since the moment her previously mundane existence had been shattered by the appearance of Kyle Reese and his visions of the future, she had been geared toward protecting John and stopping Judgment Day; running, hiding, searching, and strategizing, Judgment Day had consumed her mind. She had made no plans for surviving it. 

She remembered the day her previous life ended; it had been a normal enough day: she was late for work as usual, had a bad day waitressing: typical rude children and self-important businessmen. Then her co-worker dragged her in to watch the news and told her, “You’re dead.” Looking back, Sarah realized that those words were more true than she had realized. She had died that day, or at least the young, naive, slightly ditzy college student had. From that day on, she had begun a curious half-life of hiding and fighting, trying to preserve a way of life she only caught glimpses of, like a shadow world that she ghosted at the edges of. Normalcy had been forgotten in the push to hone herself into a weapon, to make herself strong enough to protect and raise her son, and to prevent the world from ending. Dreams she had held, college, career, a house, a husband, children… All except John, they had all been ground down and forgotten in her rush to embrace the future Kyle had laid out for her.

And now… the world as she knew it, the world she had fought to protect, was gone. Sara scrubbed her face with her palms as a question formed in the stillness of her mind: how might she have lived her life differently if she had known Judgment Day was impossible to stop? 

It was a sobering thought: In her hermitically sealed prison, all the fighting and running had come to an abrupt end and she was left with very little to show for her life. John was alive, as far as she knew, but there was little beyond that that she could point to that made her life worth the years she had spent living it. With the benefit of hindsight, she saw all the different ways she might have lived and what she might have done differently. If she hadn’t tried to blow up Cyberdyne, she wouldn’t have been locked away and lost years with John, years she knew he still resented her for. Miles wouldn’t have had to die, Danny would not have had to grow up without a father, Andy might still be alive… If she had only known. She had promised Theresa that no one dies in vain and that had been a lie. So many lives had been sacrificed to her drive to save the future, to change John’s fate.

She felt emptied, of all drive and purpose, like someone had thrown a switch and cut the power. Like Cameron. 

Rolling over and tucking her arm under the pillow, Sarah stared at the deactivated terminator, the hazel eyes returning her gaze sightless and blank. A shell, emptied of purpose and hollow, just like Sarah. But there had to be something more; John’s plan had to be more elaborate than just locking Sarah in the silo; she wasn’t supposed to live out her life in a tomb with only a terminator for company, was she? For a moment, Sarah regretted her haste in deactivating Cameron, but she clamped down on the emotion lest it give rise to others, like pity or remorse. Spurred by her need to avoid the turn her thoughts had taken, Sarah rolled over and sat up, her feet hitting the floor with thump. She, unlike the terminator, was not inert and it was time she stopped acting like it. Stripping off her shirt and fatigues, she headed for the shower purposefully.

The hard, hot spray was heaven; Sarah wasn’t sure how Cameron had bathed her while she was unconscious, but it felt like it had been years since she had felt truly clean. She scrubbed at her hair with the shampoo and watched as several long brown strands washed from her hands to circle the drain.

Sarah frowned when she stepped out of the shower area to once again confront Cameron’s lifeless body, and she dressed hurriedly, feeling as if the sightless eyes were fixed on her back. She made a mental note to drag the body somewhere out of sight, but first she had to satisfy an intense craving that drove her to the mess hall. The smell of fresh brewed coffee filled the air, and Sarah savored her first sip, trying to count the days since her last cup. She had a moment of panic when she realized that she had no idea how many days had passed since Cameron had locked them in the silo, but she decided it didn’t really matter. The fight was over and she had lost; who cared how many days it had been? 

As the caffeine hit her system, Sarah began to once again consider her future. Her mug rattled to the tabletop as she leapt up, hastily making her way to the walk-in freezer to begin a quick inventory. Cameron had been correct; there was plenty of fresh, frozen, and dried food, including, Sarah realized with a sigh, enough coffee in the freezer, to last several months at least. Grabbing eggs, bacon, and frozen biscuits out of storage, she decided to fix a decent breakfast. She no longer felt as weak and malnourished as she had while hiding in the silo, thanks to the IV Cameron had given her, but nothing could take the place of an actual meal.

Sarah knew that her pretense of activity was merely that, a pretense. The air circulating through the vents was a mockery of the breath of another person, a subtle reminder of her isolation. She was trapped and alone, and she had no idea of what the next steps were, or even if there were any next steps. Faced with the vast blankness of her future, she had no idea of what she should be doing or what she should prepare for. All her adult life, she had planned, learned military tactics, and honed her body in order to defend her son and fight for his future. Now, she waited, for what she did not know. 

A sudden tension gripped her frame; there was no way in hell she was simply going to sit and wait for someone to come find her and let her out of this prison. Even if she no longer knew what the future held, John was still out there, if what Cameron said was true. “I’ll always find you,” she had promised John, and a locked door and a nuclear apocalypse weren’t going to keep her from her promise. In fact, Sarah wasn’t sure that she was actually trapped there; Cameron had said she had disabled the emergency exits, but she might not have been telling the truth. It wouldn’t be the first time the terminator had lied to her, Sarah thought bitterly, as she remembered the magnitude of the lies that had led her to this point. 

With that in mind, Sarah strode purposefully down the stairs but her steps faltered as she took in the demolition in the control room. Several components were smashed on the floor, and bits of metal and plastic littered the entire room. Shaking her head, Sarah ignored the mess and continued down to the lowest level of the crew quarters, where most of the maintenance systems were housed. Massive generators and water recyclers took up most of the space, the floor vibrating through the soles of her boots at the constant operation of the machinery. Sarah glanced at the dials, which showed a steadfast green across the board, which was a good thing since Sarah didn’t think she would be able to do anything if one of them slipped into the red. She ran a hand through her hair, realizing how precarious her situation was. Her life depended on these machines, for air to breath and water to drink, and she was alone without the know-how or ability to fix them if they should break before she figured out a way out of there. 

She completed her circuit of the room and found the hatch built into the farthest wall, just where it was supposed to be. The wheel that secured the door had been twisted off and tossed aside, and Sarah fingered the sharp edges of the metal carefully. Not even a welder would have been able to put the mechanism back on, and Sarah sighed in frustration. Cameron had indeed locked them in efficiently and effectively. 

She had a moment of panic as she felt the walls pressing in one her again, and she took several deep deliberate breaths to keep from hyperventilating, willing herself to calm down. It seemed to help; the muscles across her ribcage eased and her hands, clenched into fists, slowly relaxed. Another wave of lethargy washed over her as she stared at her hands, her empty hands, and her thoughts of earlier returned. The world had ended and she had nothing to show for it, nothing tangible, nothing to hold on to. In all of her years of running, she hadn’t had time for sentiment or memorabilia. After her botched attempt to blow up Cyberdyne, her few possessions, which consisted of a few pictures and mementos from people she had met along her travels, had ended up in storage somewhere and she hadn’t gone back for them after breaking out of the hospital. With Charley she had accumulated a few things, but she left most of them when they had fled and lost the rest when Cameron had brought them forward in time. 

Sarah had lived her life by a simple rule: leave no trace. Things were traces; they could be found and used after the fact to prove that she existed, that she had traveled through, so she had strictly controlled what she carried with her. But what kind of a mother didn’t have baby pictures of her child? She remembered a night before they left the jungle; John was maybe 5 or 6, and she had just made the decision to go back to the States and hunt down the people who created the machines that ended the world. She sat there, that night, with a bottle of tequila and a small stack of Polaroids, pictures of John as a baby, him taking his first step and holding his first gun. Slowly, one by one, she sat there and fed them into the fire, taking a hit from the bottle every time she felt her eyes tear up. And now, even if she had anything to go back to, it was all nuked, vaporized, burned to ash just like those pictures in that campfire. 

Her muscles protested as she straightened, and Sarah groaned, her voice loud in the silence. She wasn’t sure how long she had been lost in thought, but her body told her it had been a while. Giving the door one last look, Sarah headed upstairs to accomplish at least one of her goals today.

Cameron’s body was cold to the touch, just like a real one, but far heavier. Sarah dropped the arm she was holding back into place and sank down into the other bunk, suddenly exhausted. She wiped the thin sheen of sweat from her forehead, surprised at how quickly she tired, a side effect of her long deprivation of food and water. She gazed at Cameron, who was peacefully composed, her hands crossed over her stomach and her head tilted to the side. Sarah remembered the silky smoothness of the terminator’s hair and had a sudden image of dragging the terminator’s body over the scruffy, dirty floor. She wondered if she should find a gurney or something, to give Cameron’s body a small measure of dignity. She had, after all, taken care of Sarah; Sarah owed her.

Sarah bolt upright and shook her head. She was thinking of Cameron as ‘her,’ not as ‘it,’ not as a machine. She was on her feet then and her hand tightened on Cameron’s arm to pull her off the bunk.

A few moments later, light returned to the hazel of Cameron’s eyes. Sarah watched as Cameron’s expression took on a faraway look, obviously accessing her memory to recall the last few minutes before she was deactivated, before those eyes turned to her.

Cameron stared up at Sarah with wonder. “You didn’t kill me.”

“I need information,” Sara’s tone was brusque, and she watched as the light in Cameron’s eyes dulled. She spun on her heel and was already retreating toward the door as Cameron replied, “Of course.”


	8. Chapter 8

Sarah made her way to the pantry, her hands moving of their own volition as she filled the water basin and placed grounds in the filter, her body on autopilot, much like the unconscious way her fingers had slid Cameron’s chip home just a few moments ago. One minute she had been standing there, holding the terminator’s arm and bracing in anticipation of the machine’s weight as she pulled it off the bed and the next…

Sarah watched as the dark liquid bubbled into the carafe, trying to reconstruct her thoughts in those fateful few seconds. But it was no use, and to no purpose. It was done; she hadn’t destroyed the terminator when she had the chance, and now she had to live with the consequences.

Filling her cup, she steeled herself and turned to face that consequence: Cameron, standing uncertainly by the door to the sleeping quarters.

Sarah indicated the table, and Cameron seated herself in mute acquiescence while Sarah stayed where she was, keeping several feet between them. Cameron was staring at her intently, her head cocked to the side and her eyes strangely affected.

“What?” Sarah didn’t even try to keep the harshness out of her voice, although she knew it wasn’t the terminator she was angry with.

“Your…” Cameron broke off, frowned, and dropped her eyes to the table. “I didn’t have the facilities here… You will have a scar.”

Sarah touched the healing laceration at her temple self-consciously, suddenly aware of the reason for the terminator’s gaze. It seemed like a lifetime ago that she had held a gun to her own head and pulled the trigger. “It’s not the first.” In the litany of scars on her body, this one seemed small and insignificant in comparison.

“I know.” There was still a note of sadness in Cameron’s voice, and Sarah remembered how the terminator had tried to take care of her, but then she clamped down hard on the memories. She had to keep her focus and not get distracted by emotions. After all, she had already made one serious error in judgment in reactivating Cameron.

“The plan,” she snapped, and Cameron blinked and brought her head up to stare at Sarah, all trace of sadness gone so completely that Sarah doubted she had seen or heard it at all. “John had to have had one,” she continued. “He wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble just to lock me in a silo with…”

“Yes,” Cameron said sharply, cutting off the last part of Sarah’s sentence. “John has a plan. After he realized that Judgment Day couldn’t be stopped, he decided to win the war when he had the best strategic advantage.”

Strategic advantage? What did her being locked in this bunker with a machine have to do with some strategic advantage in the war with Skynet? Sarah shook her head and fixed Cameron with a gaze, prompting her to continue.

“There aren’t many records of the years after Judgment Day. Most of what we know is about the day itself.”

“Skynet goes online and blows up the world,” Sarah filled in impatiently. Her fingers tapped out a rhythm on the coffee cup as a subtle tension began to build in her as the feeling of the walls closing in started to constrict her chest.

“Skynet goes online, achieves self-awareness, recognizes humans as a threat to its existence, and then attempts to protect itself from the threat,” Cameron corrected blandly. “In that first moment, Skynet reacted. In the seconds after achieving sentience, it identified a threat and used available resources to eradicate the threat.”

“Huge shitpiles of nuclear bombs.”

Cameron frowned at Sarah’s description, and then nodded seriously. “Yes. But it’s important to realize that Judgment Day was not planned. Skynet threw everything available to take out the threat. Afterwards, Skynet no longer had a supply of weapons or the ability to manufacture them. It had to regroup, create a whole new infrastructure… power, factories, materials…” The terminator looked up at Sarah then, as if she expected some retort, and then continued when Sarah stayed silent. “That didn’t happen overnight. But it took years before humans pieced together what had happened and realized who their real enemy was. In the meantime…”

“In the meantime, Skynet wasn’t idle,” Sarah finished. She gave in to her uneasiness and began to pace, her coffee cup abandoned on the counter.

Cameron tracked her movements and nodded. “Skynet had created an army.”

Sarah pulled up short to fix the terminator with a glare. “So what does this have to do with John? Or me?”

“John’s plan. His gambit.”

Sarah shook her head again, trying to make sense of it. “Gambit?”

“It’s a chess term. ‘An opening in which a minor piece, or pieces, usually a pawn, is offered in exchange for a favorable position’.” Cameron cocked her head to the side. “It also means any ‘maneuver, stratagem, or ploy, especially one used at an initial stage’.”

“I don’t need a vocabulary lesson, girlie.” Sarah put the pieces together carefully, her feet moving again of their own accord. “So John is, what? Planning on striking Skynet now? When it’s vulnerable? That’s his ‘gambit’?”

“Yes.”

“How? Is he going to send fighters back from the future?”

Cameron shook her head. “No. The future is still the future, for now. He can’t send fighters back without exposing critical fronts. And possibly alerting Skynet of his plan.”

“So?” Sarah urged impatiently when Cameron paused.

“He has an army here. Now. In this time.”

“He has… what? How? If he can’t send them from the future…”

“He has been sending some people back. They have been laying the groundwork.”

Cameron was being careful, almost evasive, and Sarah knew there was something in her son’s plan that even a terminator knew would make her angry. “Laying the groundwork how?” she asked with a edge in her voice.

“There are groups. Existing paramilitary groups. Here and in other countries. John has sent people to work among them, prepare them…”

“You mean militias,” Sarah interjected. “Those crazies out in the woods playing at solider? Stockpiling weapons?”

“They have some training,” Cameron replied defensively. “And they are mostly off the grid…”

“And easy to manipulate?”

Cameron nodded in affirmation. “They are predisposed to believe end-of-times rhetoric and are easily led by charismatic leaders who speak to their fears and prejudices.”

Sarah rubbed her forehead, feeling a headache starting. “What an army.”

“There are other groups as well. There are environmental extremists who are anti-technology and…”

The budding headache became a full-fledged roar. “Environmental extremists? Like the Save the Whales crowd? What is John thinking?” She didn’t keep up much with politics or contemporary affairs, but she knew enough to know that those groups tended to not mix well. Or at all.

“He’s utilizing available resources to form an army to combat Skynet while it’s vulnerable.”

“If his ‘army’ doesn’t kill each other first.”

“That is a calculated risk, but John believes that they will band together to fight a common enemy.”

“Skynet.”

“Skynet,” Cameron agreed.

Sarah snagged her cup and took a sip of her now-cold coffee, grimacing at the taste. It was crazy, but it might work, she reasoned. Besides, there was little she could do to change the plan now, trapped as she was.

“So these groups, John’s army, they’ve been preparing?”

“Yes. There were pre-determined places and dates…”

“Like Judgment Day?”

Cameron looked down at the table in front of her and nodded, seemingly afraid to meet Sarah’s eyes.

“So they knew and I didn’t?” Sarah didn’t even try to keep the bitterness out of her voice. Cameron looked ready to explain, but Sarah waved her off. “Forget it.” The terminator wasn’t responsible for her son’s actions, after all. She had just been following orders. Sarah turned her attention to a more immediate concern. “So what happens now? How the hell do I get out of here?”

Cameron looked up at Sarah, her eyes wide. “Not yet,” she said, her body tense and ready to spring into action. When Sarah didn’t appear to be running off to try to escape the bunker, she relaxed. “The radiation levels are still unsafe. You’ll have to wait for them to reach an acceptable level.”

“When will that be?”

“It depends. On the payload of weapons used, vicinity to our location, and weather patterns.” Sarah crossed her arms and looked at the terminator with an exasperated expression. “I don’t know how long it will take,” Cameron admitted. “I’m monitoring the levels, and they are still dangerously high.”

“And when the levels are acceptable, how do I get out?”

“Someone will come. Or I can…” Cameron let her sentence trail off unfinished, and she frowned.

“Someone? You mean John?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe? Will John come here?”

There was a pause before Cameron answered. “Yes.”

“If he survived, you were going to say.”

“Yes.”

“You told me he was alive. You promised me!” Sarah’s anger sparked into sudden fire, and she slammed her coffee cup down, chipping the edge of the thick ceramic mug.

“Nothing is certain. He was on his way to a safe place with Derek Reese. He had plenty of time to reach safety before Judgment Day occurred.”

“But you don’t know for sure.” Sarah’s tone was accusing, but her anger was flaming out. Her hands ached from where she had attacked the machines some hours before and a dull ache settled between her shoulders and crept up her neck.

“No, I don’t,” the terminator answered, but Sarah barely heard her as a wave of lethargy swept through her. She wasn’t completely recovered from the last few days, she thought, as she blinked away the sudden blurriness from her vision.

“I need to sleep.”

“Ok.” Cameron got up and followed as Sarah headed toward the sleeping area. Realizing that she had a shadow, Sarah spun on her heel to confront the terminator.

“What are you doing?”

“Do you want to do it here?”

Sarah blinked, the words ‘do it’ flashing through her brain with an unsettling visual. Her hand came up to massage her aching head. “Do what?”

“Remove the chip.”

“Remove…” The sentence trailed off as Sarah realized what Cameron expected. “Cameron, I’m not, I mean I don’t…” She stopped, and then tried again. “I’m going to go lay down. You are going to stay here.”

Cameron glanced down at the place she was standing, looking a little like a lost puppy who didn’t quite understand the directions she was being given. “Cameron, I’m not going to remove your chip. I don’t…” she stopped herself before she could say, ‘I don’t want to.’ It was too much of an admission of… something.

Comprehension dawned, and Cameron’s hazel eyes widened perceptibly.

“Just… stay, ok?” Not even waiting for acknowledgment, Sarah stalked off to the sleeping area, more than ready to spend a few hours away from the cyborg. Sprawling onto the bunk face-first, she didn’t even allow her mind to circle through the information Cameron has told her before closing her eyes and falling into a deep sleep.

\- - -

Fingers on her shoulder jarred Sarah out of sleep seconds before a blast of flames and debris annihilated her, and she started, one hand automatically clamping on the hand while the other grabbed the gun from the nightstand. The arm under her fingers was unyielding and the gun met an equally rigid barrier.

Lowering the gun from where she had jammed it between the terminator’s eyes, Sarah drew in an unsteady breath and ran her fingers through her hair. “Fuck, Cameron, what are you doing?”

“You were having a nightmare.”

“Yeah, I have those.” She blinked away the visions of a library, books, burning paper flying toward her as the heat of the blast swept through.

The terminator frowned down at her, her expression creasing her smooth forehead in worry. “But it was about Judgment Day. You shouldn’t have nightmares about that anymore.”

“Yeah, well.” Sarah shrugged. The day had come and gone, and still it haunted her. “I guess it’s not real to me, not yet.” She set the gun on the table, pulled her legs up to her chest, and scrubbed her head to clear it before resting her elbows on her knees. She watched as Cameron perched on the edge of the bed beside her, a wary look in her eyes.

“What’s it like up there?” Sarah asked. In her mind’s eye, nightmare images rolled through her head like a looped filmstrip.

“It depends. Sites that took direct nuclear strikes will be burned and will have suffered significant damage. Other locations will be contaminated by fallout. Places far enough away from nuclear detonations will be relatively unchanged.”

“And here?”

“Significant fallout from the blasts that took out Los Angeles.”

“How many people survived? And how will we survive?” Images of the destroyed infrastructure, the plants, the electrical grid, the farming capabilities. Even, remembering her nightmare, the libraries and museums. Judgment Day was the first step in eradicating the human presence from the face of the earth. And even if they won, beat Skynet and reclaimed their place as the world’s dominant species, how much would be lost? Beyond the staggering human cost, Judgment Day was a blow from which they might never recover. Would the survivors have skills and technical knowledge to rebuild or would they be reduced to scavengers, living among the ruins until there was nothing left?

“We’re extinct,” Sarah said quietly as the realization grew, the incredible weight of what it meant that the world she knew was irrevocably gone.

Cameron tilted her head to the side and considered Sarah seriously. “No. Not yet. Humans are resilient.”

It was supposed to be comforting, but Sarah found that the statement had the opposite effect, chilling her to the bone. ‘Not yet,’ whispered through her head, ‘but soon.’ He legs shot out and she stood, cutting off the conversation. “I’m going to take a shower.”

The spray pelted her skin, and the headache that had followed her through the dreams threatened to return. Nothing seemed to alleviate the persistent feeling of heaviness in her limbs and the ache in her head, and she wondered if it was the recycled air and lack of sunlight or the claustrophobic feeling of the bunker that gave rise to the sensation. Sarah braced herself against the wall of the shower and let the water run down her back as she tried to recount the days they had been there. She had lost track of days and weeks, and her internal clock couldn’t even tell her if it was morning or the middle of the night.

Time all seemed to run together in a single strand of sleeping, showering, and eating. As were the activities, she thought as she shook herself and roused from a near doze.

Sarah smelled food cooking, and she found dinner waiting for her as she stepped out of the alcove, towel-drying her hair. Cameron was nowhere to be seen, but the results of her effort in the kitchen were waiting. Sarah wolfed down the food, all, she noted sourly, better prepared than she could herself, and then lingered over her coffee, hoping the caffeine would clear her head.

Finally, unable to delay the inevitable, she went to hunt down Cameron.

It didn’t take much looking. She found the cyborg down in the control room, much changed from the last time she had seen it. Cameron had cleaned the room, sweeping and scouring to remove all evidence of Sarah’s meltdown. She had even repaired some of the equipment and was now sitting knee-deep in wires behind the launch control panel. Cameron looked up as Sarah’s boots rattled the plates of the stairs and for a second, her mouth seemed poised to deliver a welcoming smile. Sarah glanced away hurriedly, taking in the clean and orderly space and running a finger over a console, before looking back at the now-inexpressive face of the terminator.

“You cleaned.”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t need to do that. I was going to take care of it.”

Cameron tilted her head quizzically. “Why?”

“Because it’s my responsibility? Because I was the one made the mess?” Cameron still stared at up at her with eyes narrowed in confusion and Sarah shook her in frustration, a short, angry shake. “It’s not your job to take care of me,” she explained.

“I like taking care of you.”

“So you’ve said.”

Cameron untangled herself from the mess of wires and tools. “You don’t like it when I take care of you,” she said as she brushed dust from her pants, a note of irritation in her voice.

“I don’t like it when anyone takes care of me, but you, you’re a machine. Why would I want you to take care of me? You, your kind have made my life a living hell and you think that you can just…” The expression on Cameron’s face turned pensive, her eyes dropped to the floor, and Sarah felt a twist in her guts that felt like guilt. Guilt. For making a terminator feel bad. Her hand reached up to massage the back of her neck, feeling her skin burning under her fingers. “That’s not the point, you… I, I can take care of myself. I don’t need you to do that.”

Cameron reached out and slid her fingers down Sarah’s arm, the soft touch raising the hairs and momentarily causing Sarah to lose her train of thought. “What the hell?” She snatched her arm back, out of the terminator’s reach.

“Your skin is damp and the temperature is elevated. You are not well.”

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about! I can take care of myself. You’re not a servant. That’s not why I…” Sarah’s sentence trailed off as she realized she had stumbled onto the subject she had expressively been avoiding since those hazel eyes had blinked open and gazed at her in confusion.

“Why did you?” Cameron asked in the sudden silence.

“I, um.” Sarah ran a hand through her hair, feeling sweat beading on her forehead even in the cool of the silo. “I don’t know,” she confessed quietly. “I don’t know why I didn’t destroy your chip when I had the chance.”

“You should have.”

Sarah blinked. Had the terminator just said what she thought she said. “What?”

“You had a strategic advantage. You should have used it.”

The headache she woke with was pounding in Sarah’s head. “What? What are you saying? Are you a threat I should have eliminated? An enemy?”

“No. But I’m a machine. You do not trust me.”

“I, no, I don’t, but…” A memory swam in her head, her fingers sliding the chip home, her eyes anxiously searching for the light to bring the hazel back to life. It wasn’t information, a housekeeper, or even a companion she had wanted, but her, Cameron, the killing machine with soft hands and eyes that looked at her with concern and care, that she had wanted. It was not knowledge Sarah particularly welcomed, and she buried it ruthlessly.

“I…” Sarah took a step and staggered into the console, her hands reaching out to brace herself meeting soft flesh instead. She recoiled, nearly tripping over her own feet in the process. “Don’t touch me!”

Cameron jerked her hand back, but she stayed close. “You have a fever,” she pointed out reasonably. “You’re ill.” Sarah didn’t deny it. Stepping closer, Cameron slid her hand up to cradle Sarah’s elbow in subtle support and this time Sarah didn’t pull back. Looking into a pair of startled green eyes, Cameron entreated, “Let me take care of you.”

Coming on the heels of her insistence that she could take care of herself, Sarah fought to stand upright and not collapse under the terminator’s touch, but it was hard. A second hand slid around her waist to steady her as she swayed on her feet, and she swallowed past the lump that rose in her throat. She shook her head ‘no’ even as her resolve crumpled and she began to slump forward. Sarah didn’t say anything; she just let herself be drawn into the circle of the terminator’s arms as a sudden chill racked her body.


End file.
